Can the Implementation of Social Protection Policies and Programme Reducing Households and Community Vulnerability to Poverty in Uganda?

Abstract

The existence of disconnected and overlapping research findings on who are the vulnerable groups in post-conflict communities of Uganda continues to mingle around the mind of scholarly researchers, policy and decision makers. Most of these groups have had specific research studies conducted and strategic policies designed to address the findings. This article tries to provide an approach to understanding of the concept of vulnerability from social protection perspective. In this regards, the paper looks at and reviews available text on who are vulnerable group in Ugandan context and then focus on more general issues of poverty and vulnerability at household and community level. It further examines the causes of household and community vulnerability to poverty and suggests what social protection interventions provided by the state and non-state actors in reducing their vulnerability to poverty can do. The vulnerable communities reviewed are those households and communities members emerging from inter-intra-conflicts in northern and eastern Uganda. The article begins with an overview of poverty trends and distribution and identifies who are the vulnerable poor in the context of Uganda. For this paper, we define or identify vulnerable households as those persons living in one roof of a home and are always susceptible to shocks and risks such as limited access to education, health facilities, shelter, safe and clean drinking waters, while the paper identifies vulnerable communities as those communities with no or existing poor social infrastructures such as medical facilities, bad roads and old building school structures.

Keywords: poverty, vulnerability, vulnerable households and communities