Hundreds of thousands of refugees have fled to northern Uganda since July 2016, following renewed violence in South Sudan. Over 630,000 refugees have since arrived in Uganda and thousands continue to arrive every week, bringing the total number of South Sudanese refugees and asylum-seekers to over 900,000.
This makes Uganda the largest hosting country for South Sudanese refugees, and also the largest refugee hosting country in Africa. Some 86 per cent of the South Sudanese refugees in Uganda are women and children under 18.
MSF started its emergency response in July 2016 in Adjumani. Currently MSF is working in four refugee settlements – Bidi Bidi, Imvepi, Palorinya and Rhino – providing inpatient and outpatient medical care, maternity care and nutritional care, and conducting community health surveillance and water and sanitation activities.
Access to water is one of the biggest issues in the refugee settlements and MSF has been scaling up operations in water support. In Ofua zones in Rhino, people received around 4.6 litres per person per day in April. In Palorinya, MSF produces average of 2 million litres per day from the River Nile, supporting over 100,000 people.
During the month of April 2017, MSF provided 25,775 outpatient consultations, treated 3,307 cases of malaria and produced over 50 million litres of water.