Excitement As European Union Extends Support To Arua City And Koboko Municipality Through Cities Alliance

ARUA/KOBOKO: The European Union (EU) has extended financial support to Arua City and Koboko Municipality through Cities Alliance for the implementation of Sustainable Urban Integration of Displacement Affected Communities (SUIDAC), a project which has caused a lot of excitement among stakeholders.

The grant received by ACAV through the United Nations Office for Project Services (UNOPS) – Cities Alliance is aimed at providing technical Assistance to  implement the project so as to enhance the sustainable urban integration of displacement affected communities (DACs) in Arua City and Koboko Municipality.

Speaking during stakeholders’ meetings organized in Arua City and Koboko Municipality to disseminate area and need-based assessment and perception survey results on Thursday and Friday respectively, Moses Acole, the Project Manager who doubles as the Interim Head of Programs at ACAV, said of the grant received, Arua city will get USD1.074M (about Shs3.95bn) while Koboko Municipality will receive USD1.3M (about Shs4.79bn).

He said ACAV will get USD841,000 (about Shs3.09bn) to support the organization in giving technical assistance to Arua city and Koboko Municipality to implement the project inline with the project management guidelines and the donor-grant management guidelines including policies and the laws that are supposed to be followed.

“So, right now, we are disseminating the findings of assessments that ACAV conducted together with Arua city and Koboko Municipality basically to assess the needs of the displacement affected people including the refugees, asylum seekers, internally displaced persons (IDPs), returnees and their host communities,” Acole said.

He added that: “The SUIDAC project has two objectives to achieve; one is self-reliance and socio-cohesion among the DACs and the host communities. And the second objective is looking at the readiness of City and Municipality administration, regional and national governments on how they can integrate the needs of the DACs in their policies, plans and service delivery.”

Acole said based on the Koboko Municipality model of Comprehensive Refugee Response Framework (CRRF), inclusive urban development and mobility action project which was successfully implemented from 2020 to 2023, the European Union had to extend more support to address the needs of self-settled refugees and other migrants in nine more secondary cities in the Sub-Saharan Africa including Koboko Municipality and Arua City.

Following an assessment done by VNG International, Koboko Municipality has a total of 24,936 self-settled refugees while Arua has 23,817 self-settled refugees.     

“So, as ACAV, we are here to provide technical assistance and build the capacity of the staff including political and the technical staffs to implement the SUIDAC project very well to ensure that there is impact of this project and there is accountability for the project because we have seen that there is already commitment. The council of Koboko Municipality approved this, it is a very high level of commitment, the same thing to Arua City. So, this shows that there is a high rate of success in this project,” Acole said.

He noted that the first phase of the project is ending in March 2025 while the next phase which is going to be implementation of the project by the two cities will start in April this year.

“So, from April, the Town Clerks and the Mayors will have to sign the grant agreement of the two cities and start implementation, and we shall come in to support them to see that the implementation goes on successfully,” Acole remarked.

According to David Aziku, the ACAV Monitoring and Evaluation Specialist, the design phase of the SUIDAC project started in November last year with conducting the area needs-based assessment and perception survey to inform feasibility studies for both Arua City and Koboko Municipality.

“So, we were able to look at areas of environment, education, health, water, hygiene and sanitation, roads, protection and livelihoods among others. In those areas, you find under the environment, most of the people that live in Koboko Municipality and Arua City still depend on charcoal as a source of energy for cooking which poses a threat to our environment. Then in education, the perception of people is still poor towards the education services; many say performance in private schools is better than in government schools just because there is too much congestion in classrooms,” Aziku stated.

He said for example in Koboko Municipality, on average, five children sit on one desk while for Arua City, it is about seven pupils per desk coupled with very high classroom-pupil ratio of about 127 pupils in a class in Koboko and 118 pupils in a classroom in Arua City – far above the recommended standard of 53 pupils per classroom.

As a result, Aziku said the SUIDAC project has come to address some of the challenges being highlighted in the needs assessment and perception survey by building more classrooms and improving the social well being of DACs and host communities in Arua City and Koboko Municipality. 

Wilson Sanya, the Koboko Municipality Mayor, expressed gratitude to the European Union for coming to their aid, saying that the SUIDAC project is going to help them improve on the peaceful coexistence with the DACs.

“I want to thank the European Union for continuing to trust Koboko Municipality with yet another project code-named SUIDAC. So, this project has come timely in such a way that as the donors continue to reduce on the basket of funding, we want to use much of this money to build our resilience to be able to sustainably continue to integrate with DACs, build our social-cohesion and to make sure that our readiness is being prepared as a local government, as a region and as a country,” Sanya said.

Meanwhile David Kyasanku, the Arua City Clerk, promised that with the coming of the SUIDAC project through schools (education), health and local economic development, they are going to make sure their DACs are properly reintegrated.

However, Salim Kumakech, the Arua Resident City Commissioner (RCC), warned against mismanagement of the funds sent to support the communities in Arua City and Koboko Municipality.

“This is a clarion call that going forward, the Town Clerks and your team, because you are the ones who will be seeing and touching these resources, let the resources be put to good use for which it has been planned. We need to use the resources well so that we can continue saying we have used this, give us more,” Kumakech said.

In his remarks, Patrick Bongo Namisi, the project management support senior officer working with Cities Alliance, said they are very grateful that the approach used is the approach of cocreation where the project proposals were exclusively designed by Arua City council and Koboko Municipal council with the technical support of ACAV.

“It is a unique way of working and this is helping to build capacities of Arua City and Koboko Municipality to be able to generate their own proposals as a way of also enhancing their capacity to mobilize additional resources besides the traditional funding that they normally get from the central government and we hope they will be able to sustain this momentum and successfully deliver on this pilot SUIDAC project which is generously funded by the European Union through Cities Alliance that is doing the direct management,” Bongo said.

The SUIDAC project will address the nexus between forced displacement and urban development in nine different cities of Kananga and Tshikapa in DRC, Assosa and Jigjiga in Ethiopia, 2 cities in Somalia, one in Sudan and Koboko Municipality and Arua City in Uganda.

It will focus on governance, citizenship, environment, economic realities, and services that lie at the nexus between forced displacement and urban development.