Mission Uganda

Thank you for visiting! This fund is being collected for Dr Sharif’s upcoming mission trip to the Kyangwali Refugee Settlement in Uganda. This is planned for late January 2022. The settlement provides medical, education, vocational and relocation assistance to refugees from numerous areas as well as members of the local hosting communities. This trip is intended to be the first of several missions with the goal of recruiting, training and supporting a fully functional medical and surgical service tailored to the needs of the local community. Any assistance is greatly appreciated and will be used to develop the surgical program with training materials, disposables, equipment and building improvements. Further, your donation will be utilized in the local community to achieve these goals which further supports the local community. Please see the attached photos, links and location description. Thank you for your attention and consideration!

 

 

 

Uganda is one of the largest refugee-hosting nations in the world (first in Africa and third globally). Uganda has a longstanding history of hosting refugees with 1.4 M refugees and asylum-seekers so far (the highest number in the country’s history). Throughout 2016-2018, Uganda was impacted by three parallel emergencies from South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), and Burundi.

The vast influx of refugees is due to the ongoing crises in Uganda’s neighboring countries, especially war and violence, economic crisis and political instability, and relatively hospitable policies in Uganda (refugees in Uganda are provided with some essential rights such as rights to education, work, private property, healthcare, and other social services).

In the health sector, the influx of refugees has placed a lot of pressure on health programs in the country. According to the Ugandan Ministry of Health, there is only one doctor for every 24,000 residents and one nurse for every 11,000.

 

 

 

 

Kyangwali Refugee Settlement is a refugee camp in Kikuube District (formerly Hoima District) in western Uganda. Kyangwali refugee settlement was established in the 1960s to accommodate Rwandan refugees. After many Rwandans repatriated voluntarily in 1994, the settlement has hosted mostly Congolese refugees. South Sudanese and Congolese (DRC) refugees first entered Kyangwali in 1996 and 1997 respectively. By 2002, the population was slightly above 40,000 refugees with majority South Sudanese; however, when South Sudan gained independence from Sudan in 2011, many South Sudanese Refugees in Kyangwali Refugee Settlement repatriated leaving the Settlement to be dominated by Congolese. This repatriation led to the drop in the number of refugees to slightly above 20,000 people but the start of a new refugee influx from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in mid-December 2017, has nearly quadrupled the refugee population in Kyangwali from 36,713 in December 2017 to more than 123,000 in December 2020 (81% of them are women and children – 53% of the population are females).

 

 

 

 

What makes the situation even worse in the health sector is that local medical providers lack the capacity required to respond to the growing number of refugees, especially those with critical conditions such as acute infections, newborns care, internal diseases (cardiology, pulmonary, nephrology, endocrinology…etc.), outbreaks of Cholera and Malaria (which occur regularly), complicated surgeries, victims of violence or human rights violations in their home countries…etc. Additionally, COVID-19 has negatively impacted the basic health infrastructure in the camp.

 

 

Host Organizations:

Plan for the Future (www.p4t.org) - a national charitable organization in Uganda (USRB Reg #80020002652537) whose mission is to empower communities to become healthy and self-reliant through provision of knowledge and skills. 

Medical Teams International, MTI (https://medicalteams.org/who-we-are/) - founded in 1979 to provide direct medical support to Cambodian refugees, MTI is a 501(c)(3) organization based in Portland Oregon than has over 40 years experience in assembling and delivering medical teams to crisis situations globally.