Community Perceptions in Uganda of COVID-19 - Bulletin 3 & 4 (February 2021)

As the global pandemic emerged in early 2020, it presented unprecedented challenges both to refugee communities across Uganda and the humanitarian response implemented on their behalf. Ground Truth Solutions (GTS) has consulted communities regularly over the past year and maintained remote dialogue with refugee leaders across the ten most populous settlements in the country.

The first (March 2020) and second (June 2020) rounds of consultation asked what sort of information was getting through to refugees and what behaviours to mitigate the spread of Covid-19 leaders were observing in their communities. Conversations also covered trust in such measures and how people were coping with the economic impacts of the pandemic. A third round of consultations in September 2020 aimed to sense-check and discuss our findings with the same leaders by asking for their perspective on what had worked well in the response to Covid-19 and by eliciting their recommendations on how to optimise the response. In the fourth round of dialogue in November 2020, the team communicated a synthesis of findings back to community leaders and collected additional feedback on next steps.

This report summarises the key insights and recommendations from community leaders from the most recent rounds of dialogue. References to earlier findings are linked throughout the report.