Recovering from civil war: evidence from a decade of recovery in Northern Uganda

From 1986 to 2006, Northern Uganda suffered a civil war between the Government of Uganda and the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). It affected all of Acholi and large parts of Lango sub-regions: more than 100,000 people were killed; almost all the rural population (over 2 million people) were forcibly displaced; and the local economy was destroyed. 

A previous research project had conducted three rounds of a panel survey from 2013 to 2019 in Northern Uganda, following the lives, livelihoods and attitudes of trust and political legitimacy of more than 1,500 households. SPARC had the chance to extend this unique data set into a fourth wave, to see changes in individual households over a complete decade.

Few opportunities occur to follow the lives of households as they emerge from conflict into a phase often thought of as ‘recovery’. In this report, we investigate changes to households in Northern Uganda from 2013 to 2022 and look at how trajectories in livelihoods, state services and perceptions of the state have developed since the 2019 survey. We summarise the data for the fourth survey round and compared statistics to those seen in the three previous waves.