In Uganda, our Lab is based at Nakivale Refugee Settlement in Isingiro District. It is one of the oldest refugee settlements in Africa, hosting over 170,000 refugees from the Democratic Republic of Congo, Burundi, Somalia, Rwanda, Ethiopia, and Eritrea. We focus specifically on female-headed households and displaced single mothers within this community.
 

Our in-country partner is Tumaini for Refugee Women, a grassroots organization based within the settlement that works directly with refugee women on empowerment, stability, and self-reliance. Together, we are currently collecting our first oral history from Nakivale as of April 2026.
 

The work here requires particular coordination and skill. Nakivale's population represents massive linguistic complexity, women in the settlement speak Lingala, Kinyarwanda, Somali, Kirundi, Amharic, and Tigrinya, among others, with KiSwahili emerging as a shared language across communities. Every interview requires careful language matching and translation.

What makes the logistics even more demanding is that Nakivale covers well beyond 180 square kilometers and has no reliable mobile network inside the settlement. Women must travel significant distances outside its boundaries to access data connectivity, a journey that takes planning, coordination, transport, and time, just to participate in the recording process. That effort, largely invisible in the final oral history, is part of what makes each story here hard-won and irreplaceable.