Currently Uganda is hosting over 1 million refugees, of which over 900,000 are from South Sudan. Refugees are fleeing horrific human rights violations including sexual violence, torture and even death in South Sudan. Uganda has one of the most generous and progressive approaches to hosting refugees in the region, if not the world. Refugees are given relative freedom of movement, equal access to primary education, healthcare and other basic social services, and the right to work and own a business.

The local OpenStreetMap community in collaboration with the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team is engaging refugees and community members in Northern Uganda to map vulnerabilities and assets in the places they live, filling in key data gaps and blank spots on OpenStreetMap in order to improve program planning and service delivery to refugee communities, develop better integration with host communities, and build refugee self-reliance through open map data