“How Can We Survive Here?” The Impact of Mining on Human Rights in Karamoja, Uganda

Basic survival is very difficult for the 1.2 million people who live in Karamoja, a remote region in northeastern Uganda bordering Kenya marked by chronic poverty and the poorest human development indicators in the country. Traditional dependence on semi-nomadiccattle-raising has been increasingly jeopardized. Extreme climate variability, amongst other factors, has made the region’s pastoralist and agro-pastoralist people highly vulnerable to food insecurity. Other factors include gazetting of land, under both colonial and recent governments, for wildlife conservation and hunting that prompted restrictions on their mobility, and more recently the Ugandan army’s brutal campaign of forced disarmament to rid the region of guns and reduce raids between neighboring groups caused death and loss of livestock.