According to information gathered from local community leaders and municipal officials, the Uganda Peoples Defence Air Forces (UPDAF) claims security as the pretext for ordering the Makusa and Lwamunyu fishing community’s eviction. However, after several engagements between the community and highly placed government and military officials, the eviction was halted, with UPDAF and local authorities agreeing to an extensive review before any action is taken. This study contributes to any such review.

The community under threat is composed of two smaller groups that were originally living on the two nearby islands of Makusa and Lwamunyu in Lake Victoria. The islands, from which the groups claim to have been violently evicted more than a year before, also lie within the jurisdiction of Entebbe Municipality.

The project involved two processes: One involved training in the norms of the integrated human rights and development approach, emphasizing the international legal standards. The second involved quantitative survey research. Linking these processes was a Uganda-wide typology of displacement and dispossession cases affecting women, including the profiling of values at stake in five priority cases. That led to a selection process in a second iteration of training to determine the one case in which to apply the VIA tool, which captures the values, assets and costs at stake.

After initial assessments of the case, the local research team applied HLRN`s VIA tool, adapting it to address the specific impact on women in the displaced community. The tool helped to provide critical insights into the complex dynamics that underpin conditions of pre-eviction and displacement in relation to deprivation in its various forms. SSA- UHSNET pretested and validated the VIA tool before surveys commenced to generate information that could be adopted to develop relevant policy recommendations and institutionalize reparation mechanisms.