Word: karamoja
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...that make up the roughly 2 million WFP-aid recipients in the country. There are more than 170,000 refugees from neighboring countries, and nearly 1 million who have been "internally displaced" in northern Uganda by a long-running guerrilla war. Then there are the residents of drought-stricken Karamoja, as well as pregnant and nursing mothers and HIV/AIDS patients. A ballooning food budget, coupled with the off-again, on-again nature of donor funding, have threatened nearly every Uganda program at some point this year. "Prioritization is extremely difficult for us," Negash says, "because all these categories...
...overhead costs are no more than 7% of total operating budget. But today's food and fuel shortages don't just mean higher costs; they also introduce new elements of unpredictability to getting aid to those who need it. The day after distributing to Lokali parish, WFP officers in Karamoja are out again in nearby Moruongor. But the food trucks only trundle up to the distribution point at noon, three hours after recipients began gathering along the side of the dirt road. The reason for the delay: the weekend's diesel delivery never arrived from Kampala. "We spent most...
...returned to Burundi after a ceasefire deal failed, so WFP must postpone plans to stop feeding Burundian refugees in Tanzania. WFP is sometimes a target of violence too. Darfur rations were cut by nearly half in May because too many trucks had been hijacked. Distribution was suspended briefly in Karamoja last year after cattle rustlers ambushed a convoy and shot dead the lead driver. The trucks, returning from a delivery, were all empty...
...where food aid is unnecessary. But as food prices rise and budgets become less predictable, programs like these are also the first to be slashed. Martin Devenish, an Irish priest who runs a technical college near Moruongor parish, is proud to be teaching trades that could bring industry to Karamoja: carpentry, tailoring and bricklaying. Today dozens of adult students sit at benches, eating their midday meal, mostly corn provided by WFP. But each time the priest turns on the radio and hears about possible food-aid cuts, "I'm thinking what about here!," Devenish says...
...Widows, orphans, they should be fed first." Then everyone else, he asserts, should be enrolled in food-for-work programs, improving the roads, digging water ponds and farming. "That's what can help people," he says - and he may be right. Long-term, WFP's only way out of Karamoja will come when the region is self-sufficient once again. Getting there will take a predictable budget, more security, and time for forward planning - all luxuries now. And yet as the sun beats down on the squabbling crowds, no one here claims that WFP's efforts have been wasted...