Journal of Emerging Trends in Economics and Management Sciences: Home

Article Title:
Impact Of The Public Programme On The Household Welfare In Refugee Hosting Communities In Uganda: Evidence From Development Response To Displacement Impacts Project
by James Wokadala (Ph.D), Adrian Ssesanga, Herbert Akampwera

Abstract:
Uganda is among the countries with a high number of refugees and has a myriad of public programmes seeking to impact the welfare of the refugees as well as that of the host communities. However, there has hardly been any assessment on the impact of such interventions on the welfare of the targeted households. This paper contributes to the existing literature by seeking to assess the impact of government intervention in transforming the lives of the households in the refugee setting in Uganda. Further, knowledge of the correlates of household wellbeing as well as the winners and losers of such interventions is necessary to guide policy direction. Analysis was aided by the difference-in-difference regression to depict the causal link between the programme intervention and household incomes. Results show that the interventions translated into increases in the household incomes along the lower and upper percentiles. Further, households that benefited from the projects improved their incomes (by 2.43%) significantly (at 1%) compared to the control group of households. The impact remains positive and significant even after controlling for interactions effects. The results further show that individual household characteristics such as number of school going children, asset index, literacy and location of the household have significant positive effect sizes on household incomes. It was concluded that this public programme has the potential to redistribute incomes and expenditures for the households in both the lowest and highest percentiles within the refugee setting in Uganda.

Keywords: Public programme, Refugee, Host community, Household welfare, Impact

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