Fragile Friends: The Consequences of Aid Reductions for Social Cohesion Between Refugees and Hosts

How do reductions in the aid refugees receive shape social cohesion and tolerance between refugees and hosts? Uganda has hosted refugees for many years and has achieved relative success in integration compared to other host countries in the region in both policies and practices of inclusion. Historically, refugees have been heavily supported by the international community with positive spillover effects for hosting communities, helping to facilitate the positive examples of integration observed in Uganda. Recently, however, humanitarian actors have experienced substantial resource reductions that are likely to continue to shrink available resources further in the coming years. In this project, we propose to conduct a survey of 3000 host community citizens in Uganda to collect descriptive data about attitudes toward refugees. We also experimentally examine how different messaging about refugees and resource cuts might shape attitudes in the absence of aid. We pair the descriptive questions in this survey with identical descriptive questions in a companion survey of refugee households (N=5500) in the same communities to measure whether and how attitudes align between refugees and hosts.