Uganda Conflict Scan: COVID-19 & Conflict Dynamics – February 2022

Under the European Union’s Instrument contributing to Stability and Peace (IcSP) funding, Search for Common Ground has produced the fourth conflict scan for Uganda as part of its COVID-19 response programming.

These quarterly quantitative reports look at the impact of COVID-19 on pre-existing conflict dynamics, horizontal and vertical cohesion, communities’ satisfaction and trust levels in the government’s COVID-19 response and in COVID-19 responders themselves, and at trusted information channels.

Highlights

• Above 90% of those surveyed listened to Search for Common Ground radio programs, and 96% of respondents are sharing information heard on trusted media with friends or family.
• A high number of respondents (65%) report having lost their main source of income during the pandemic, both in Western and Northern Uganda.
• Many more people in Northern Uganda requested COVID-19 services (health, access to food) from the government than in the West (73% vs 36%), indicating high levels of unmet needs in the North. The pandemic and the continued drought in the North are clearly having an impact here.
• Overall satisfaction with COVID-19 service delivery decreased, and so has trust in the government—this may be partially due to the effects of the heavy lockdown in July 2021 across the country.
• An increasing percentage of people value collaboration across divides (i.e., refugees and host communities) to address the pandemic (89%). However, for the first time, we saw a significant drop in men’s feelings of safety when interacting across divides, a potential indicator of increased insecurity and violence at the community level directly involving and affecting men as a consequence of deteriorating living conditions.

The Uganda report is available for download on the left of this page.

To see the other quarterly scans for Kenya, Nigeria, Palestine, Tanzania, Uganda, and Yemen, click here.