The seasonal calendar in Karamoja is unforgiving in a normal year. When the first rains are short, the harvest is not delayed so much as cancelled, and the household falls back on livestock, wild foods and borrowing.
The nutrition signal
Screening at health facilities is the earliest reliable indicator. Admissions for acute malnutrition in under-fives typically climb weeks before any market price data confirms what families already know.
By the time the maize price moves in the trading centre, the mothers have already cut a meal.
What is different this year
Assistance budgets across the region have tightened, and rations that were once designed as a bridge are being stretched into a substitute. Local officials argue for water-for-production investment: valley tanks, boreholes for livestock and small-scale irrigation that outlast a single funding cycle.
- Office of the Prime Minister, Uganda - Government of Uganda
- Malnutrition fact sheet - World Health Organization
- Uganda Bureau of Statistics - UBOS
Simon Lomongin reports from Karamoja on pastoralist livelihoods, food security and the delivery of assistance across the sub-region.
- Karamoja
- Food security
- Pastoralist economies
