Mental well-being, social strain, and coping: refugee and host community perspectives from Kampala, Uganda

Displacement increasingly places refugees and host community members in shared social and economic spaces. In Uganda, one of the world’s largest refugee-hosting countries, the number of refugees living in Kampala has almost doubled between 2020 and 2025. Yet, urban refugees receive comparatively limited humanitarian support. This study explores how urban refugees and host community members in Kampala understand mental well-being, social relations, and coping under conditions of displacement and economic constraint. This qualitative study used focus group discussions (FGDs) within a larger mixed-methods study. Ten FGDs were conducted between July and August 2025, convening 117 adult participants across refugee groups (Congolese, Eritrean, and Somali) and Ugandans, stratified by gender. FGDs were conducted in participants’ local languages in selected Kampala neighborhoods with large refugee populations. A conflict tree framework was used as a participatory tool to explore structural, community-level, and individual drivers of conflict, stress, and well-being. Data were analyzed using an inductive-deductive thematic approach. Three key messages emerged. First, both refugee and host community participants defined mental well-being in fundamentally practical and economic terms: as the capacity to meet basic needs and fulfill social responsibilities, with livelihood access and economic stability consistently identified as foundations of well-being. Second, refugee-host relations were characterized by misperceptions about humanitarian assistance that generated discrimination, reinforced social isolation, and contributed to tensions and mistrust. Third, coping strategies, including faith, community solidarity, informal labor, substance use, and transactional sex, reflected structural constraints shaped by conditions of poverty and insecurity. Participants identified livelihood opportunities, skills training, accessible services, and responsive community leadership as the most meaningful forms of support and mechanism for rebuilding trust and mitigating conflict dynamics. Mental well-being in displacement contexts cannot be separated from the structural conditions that produce and sustain distress. Effective responses require integrated approaches that combine livelihood support, equitable service access, psychosocial programming, community trust-building, and targeted information strategies to address misperceptions and reduce escalating social tensions. Responsive local governance represents an underutilized mechanism for strengthening social cohesion in urban displacement settings.