Uganda does not have enough financial resources to handle the influx of refugees that the country is currently hosting within its borders, President Yoweri Museveni has said.

Uganda is host to 1.6 million refugees, the majority from South Sudan, DR Congo, Somalia, Burundi, and Eritrea, among others.

“In our willingness to host refugees, we face resource constraints. Enormous strain has been placed on our meagre economic resources. The international community should work with us to ensure refugees use other forms of clean energy which are the right solution the international community should help,” President Museveni said in a speech read for him by Prime Minister Robinah Nabbanja in Geneva Switzerland, during the Global Refugee Forum.

According to the President, a durable solution for the refugees is to go back to their countries of origin to enable voluntary returns noting that, “this crisis continues to grow, we must put aside our differences.”

“It should not be fashionable for Africa to be a theatre of humanitarian crisis," he stated.

Filippo Grandi, the UNHCR’s High Commissioner for Refugees commended Nabbanja for her speech.

Dwindling and inadequate resources for the refugee response in Uganda are a significant threat to the country's progressive refugee policies and an important testimony to the international community’s failure to implement commitments made under the Global Compact on Refugees.
Without urgent action to address the financing gap, Uganda may be forced to scale down its support to refugees.

The Global Refugee Forum presents an opportunity for the international community to revive commitments to support Uganda in its efforts to become a trailblazer for refugee integration, and reaffirm that the “Uganda model” is one that other countries around the world can trust, learn from and be inspired from.

Uganda's refugee statistics for the year 2022 was 1,463,523.00, a 4.34% decline from 2021. Uganda's refugee statistics for 2021 was 1,529,903.00, a 7.65% increase from 2020.

Though poor and still a developing country, Uganda is the largest refugee-hosting country in Africa, with over a million refugees, most of them from South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Burundi and Somalia. Kenya, Sudan, DRC and Ethiopia are also among the top refugee-hosting countries on the continent.

The country of asylum is the country where an asylum claim was filed and granted.

This idea is clearly embodied in Uganda's famous "Self-Reliance Strategy" (SRS). As part of this strategy, refugees in Uganda enjoy the right to work, freedom of movement within the country, access to basic services, and the right to live in local communities as well as in defined settlements.

The Global Refugee Forum is held every four years, it is the world’s largest gathering of refugees.

The forum is designed to support the implementation of the Global Compact on Refugees, including easing pressure on host countries, enhancing refugee self-reliance, increasing access to third-country solutions and improving conditions in countries of origin.

The forum also provides the opportunity for countries and stakeholders to announce migration and asylum pledges and contributions, as well as highlight progress made, share good practices and take stock of the challenges and opportunities ahead.

The forum is hosted by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) - the UN Refugee Agency, co-hosted in 2023 by the Government of Switzerland, and co-convened by Colombia, France, Japan, Jordan, Niger and Uganda.