When Uganda’s refugee policy meets children’s everyday lives

What does it mean for a refugee child to “integrate”? Is it enough to be allowed into school? To live outside a camp? To have the same rights on paper as citizens? Or does integration mean something deeper: feeling safe, being seen, building friendships, imagining a future, and knowing that your life can unfold where you are?

These are the questions at the heart of my new book, Schooling Experiences of Refugee Children in Uganda: Rethinking Integration Policies (Routledge, 2026). The book follows the rights and everyday experiences of refugee children in Kampala, Uganda, and examines how schools, neighborhoods, and politics both produce and limit children’s sense of belonging, safety, and ability to dream.

Uganda is often described as having one of the most progressive refugee policies in the world. It hosts almost two million refugees and, unlike many countries, allows refugees to live where they choose and to access welfare services, employment, and education alongside citizens and residents. For someone like me, who had worked with and researched asylum-seeking and refugee communities in other parts of the world, this raised an important question. What happens to refugee children in a country that, at least officially, offers them a more open future?

This question mattered to me because in many places, I’ve lived and worked in the Global North, the lives of refugee and asylum-seeking children are shaped by deep uncertainty. Children may have the right to attend basic school, but their precarious legal status can block access to higher education, professional training, work opportunities, and long-term planning. They may grow up in a country, speak its language, and feel attached to it, while still being unable to make meaningful decisions about their future as adults.

I traveled to Kampala as part of my doctoral research to understand what a more open policy looks like in children’s daily lives. I conducted ethnographic research in three very different primary schools over several months. I interviewed refugee children, parents, teachers, and staff from organizations working with refugee communities. I also asked children to draw or write about their futures, and with some of them I conducted a photography project about their everyday lives in the city.

I wanted to understand how children experienced education not only as a service, but as a right. Did school make them feel protected? Did it help them access resources? Did it give them a sense of belonging? Did it expand what they could imagine for themselves?

The answer was complicated.

One moment from my fieldwork stayed with me. A few months into the research, I spoke with a teacher about my difficulty finding parents to interview. He reassured me: “Ah, that is not a problem.” When I asked why, he explained that because the school taught refugee children, he could tell parents that their children had caused problems and that they had to come to school. Then I could interview them.

I immediately told him that I did not want to mislead parents and that I had other ways to reach them. But the exchange unsettled me. I was grateful that he had shared his plan, because it revealed something important. The power relations I had read about in anthropology books were not abstract. They were present in the school, in my research, and in the lives of refugee families. My need to find “refugee parents” for interviews could itself change the dynamics around refugee children. It emphasized how much my research and relationships around schools are also shaped by international discourse and aid structures. Focusing on refugees – as a population that the international aid community recognizes as a particularly vulnerable population – shaped my research question and local power relations.

This moment helped shape the book. I began to see that the category “refugee” does not simply describe children’s lives. It also organizes them. It can open access to resources and attention, but it can also expose children to stigma, surveillance, and manipulation. Sometimes refugee children were treated as vulnerable and deserving. Sometimes they were treated as outsiders. Sometimes schools tried to avoid the word “refugee” altogether, using terms such as “guests” or “brothers and sisters.”

The book argues that we cannot understand refugee children’s lives in Kampala through legal status alone. Where children live in the city matters enormously. Their neighborhood, the condition of roads and infrastructure, the distance to school, the cost of transport, relationships with neighbors, and teachers’ assumptions about their abilities all shape their sense of belonging and their future possibilities. In some cases, these everyday conditions mattered as much as, or even more than, children’s official status as refugees.

The classroom also mattered in ways I did not expect. Much of the research on refugee education assumes that “traditional” teaching – teacher-led lessons, repetition, learning together as a class –is conservative or exclusionary. But in the schools I studied, collective teaching practices often created a sense of safety and community. Children read aloud together, answered in chorus, and were repeatedly told, in different ways, “we are all together.”

These practices were shaped by values associated with Ubuntu, a philosophy that emphasizes mutual responsibility and shared humanity. For refugee children, this collective classroom could be comforting. It reduced the feeling of being singled out. It offered a sense of being part of a group.

At the same time, the very practices that helped blur differences could also silence them. If everyone is expected to belong together, it can become difficult to speak about discrimination, loneliness, pain, or exclusion. The classroom could create belonging, but it could also make certain experiences harder to name.

This is why the book asks us to rethink what integration means. Too often, integration is measured through simple indicators: school enrollment, language acquisition, employment, or gaps between refugees and citizens. These measures matter, but they do not tell the whole story. For children, integration is also about whether the walk to school feels safe, whether teachers believe in them, whether families can afford school materials, whether they are welcomed by neighbors, and whether they can imagine a future where they are.

The book is important beyond Uganda. It speaks to anyone concerned with the rights of children in vulnerable situations: refugee children, children of asylum seekers, children of migrant workers, and other marginalized groups. It asks us to look beyond legal categories and policy promises, and to pay closer attention to the everyday places where children’s rights are either made real or quietly denied.

At a time when wars, climate disasters, and shrinking international aid are forcing more children and families to leave their homes, this question feels urgent. How can we help displaced children not only survive, but live, learn, belong, and flourish wherever they find themselves? This book is an invitation: to researchers, activists, educators, and policymakers to look beyond categories, listen more carefully, and ask what kinds of schools, cities, and policies can truly expand children’s futures. If you would like to learn more, you can access the book here. 

And if the book feels relevant to your work or your networks or colleagues in migration studies, education, policy, or related fields, I would be grateful if you could share it.

Note: This article gives the view of the author, and not the position of the IIASA Insights blog, nor of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis.