Attachments
KEY FINDINGS
• Vulnerability and Compounding Shocks: Assessment findings suggest that humanitarian needs in the current period (identified by community members as roughly May to August) were not driven by a single acute shock or major displacement event. Rather, it is likely that affected communities have experienced a number of compounding shocks and longerterm stressors that have restricted access to foundational livelihoods and food sources and eroded household and communal coping capacity. These include repeated displacements, poor harvests resulting from consecutive years of atypically severe flooding, reduced ownership of and access to livestock, reduced access to humanitarian food assistance (HFA), and reduced access to traditional support mechanisms for worse-off households.
• Changing Displacement Dynamics: Assessment findings indicated the importance of movement to coping and adapting during historical periods of hunger. Participants in 10 focus group discussions (FGDs) (4 context mapping and 6 at-risk of severe hunger focused discussions) reported a wide range of locations where people displaced to during such periods including locations in Jonglei State, Upper Nile State, and refugee camps abroad. Participants also reported that, in contrast to such historical periods, fewer people had displaced in 2022, and that returns to Uror had continued since the beginning of 2022 despite the current level of needs. Reduced displacement was attributed to several main factors, including the perception of deteriorated access to resources in prospective displacement locations (including reduced access to humanitarian assistance), the erosion of familial or communal support networks, and perceptions of increased regional insecurity.
• Use of Severe Coping Strategies to Mitigate Consumption Gaps: Findings indicate that people in parts of Uror likely experienced atypically severe consumption gaps through parts of the 2022 lean season. In all 7 FGDs assessing risk of severe hunger, participants reported that they or members of their community had been consuming cattle blood roughly since the beginning of May up until the time of assessment, a reportedly extreme coping strategy used only in times of severe hunger. In most of these FGDs, participants reported that the last time people consumed cattle blood had been in 2017-2018, during the height of the conflict in Uror county. Participants in two FGDs in Panyuk and Motot reported that the large majority of their diet between food distributions consisted of wild foods and small amounts of cattle blood or milk. When comparing the current period to historical periods of hunger, participants in the majority of FGDs assessing risk severe hunger (six out of seven) reported that the current period was as bad or more severe than historical periods, including those in 1991, 2005, and 2017 (see figure 1).
• Erosion of Community Coping Capacity: Community leaders and local NGO staff participating in two context mapping FGDs reported perceiving a substantial shrinking of the upper and middle classes and swelling of the poor and extremely poor classes since 2013. The poorest group, the “changai,” is reportedly composed of a growing population of fragmented households, households headed by vulnerable individuals such as older persons, unaccompanied minors, or persons with disabilities — all of whom face significant barriers to participating in physically strenuous livelihoods — and/or households who have lost or had to liquidate all or most of their assets. It is likely that the reported decline in size of the upper and middle classes and simultaneous growth of the poorer classes has restricted access to vital communal support mechanisms for worse-off households in these areas.
• Access to Humanitarian Food Assistance: Participants in four FGDs assessing risk of severe hunger, and community leaders in one context mapping FGD reported that access to HFA had decreased since the beginning of 2022. A KI working with a humanitarian NGO engaged in HFA activities reported that the period between distributions in Uror had increased by 15 days beginning in April. The same KI reported that the last registration for general food distribution (GFD) had occurred in November 2019 in all but 2 payams, and, as such, many people who had since returned had not been registered to receive food assistance. These individuals had reportedly been sharing distribution rations with registered households, causing stocks to exhaust more quickly, according to FGDs with community members.
• Barriers to Accessing Healthcare: Health service providers KIs reported considerable barriers to accessing healthcare, which have have reportedly existed since at least 2020. Reported barriers included chronic supply and consignment issues, dilapidated infrastructure, staff shortages, and issues surrounding staff payment and retention. Health service providers reported that community frustrations regarding the quality of healthcare resulted in disruptions to the provision of services at four of the county’s seven primary health care facilities between at least February and April 2022. Further, health service providers reported that there was no operational hospital in Uror at the time of data collection in August. The nearest hospital was reportedly located in Lankien (Nyriol county), a multiple day walk from most of Uror’s main population centres.