Stronger, Safer Homes: Reinventing Mud Bricks with Cow Dung and Local Innovation
In Nakivale Refugee Settlement, families live with a constant fear—their mud-brick homes could collapse at any moment. After each rainy season, walls crack, foundations crumble, and safety slips away. For many, the choice feels impossible: live in fragile mud homes or pay triple the cost for burnt bricks that fuel deforestation. This summer, the Brick […]
Discarded to Indestructible: Plastic’s Second Life as Protection
The Problem With Roofs in Refugee Settlements When students at this summer’s Design School began discussing shelter durability, one issue rose to the top: roofs. In Nakivale Refugee Settlement, most families rely on tarps or grass thatch—cheap but fragile options that tear easily and leak constantly. Iron sheets are more durable, but they’re expensive, often […]
Designing Against Gender-Based Violence
Among this summer’s Design School students, Joy was the only woman—and from day one, her determination was clear: to confront and address gender-based violence (GBV) head-on. Joy and her husband lead a refugee-led organization supporting survivors of GBV, and she herself has lived through these painful realities. Throughout the course, she shared about the urgent […]
Stories from the Settlement: Small Innovations, Big Transformations
As part of our monitoring and evaluation, we recently gathered feedback and stories from participants of our latest programs this past year. What we heard was inspiring. Bottle Skylight: Light from a Simple Bottle Sometimes, transformation starts small. “Before this, I used to hold a jerrycan in one hand and a matchbox in the other, […]
From Risk to Renewal: Transforming Unsafe Water into Hope
In Nakivale Refugee Settlement, you can fill a jerrycan from the ground, the lake, or even a tank of rainwater saved from the last rainy season. But there’s a catch—none of it is safe to drink. For families here, every sip of unclean water carries a risk: diarrhea, cholera, typhoid—diseases that can devastate a community […]
Fighting Mosquitoes with Design: How Refugee Innovators Are Taking the Lead
August 20th is World Mosquito Day. It marks the 1897 discovery that mosquitoes spread malaria. For many, it’s just a fact from history. But for millions of displaced people living in crowded, poor conditions, mosquitoes are more than a bother—they’re a daily and deadly threat. At Every Shelter, we believe the best solutions come from […]
From Survival to Solutions: Refugees Leading by Design
This summer marks the launch of something we’ve been dreaming about for a long time: Every Shelter’s first-ever Design School, an intensive, hands-on course that puts creativity, ownership, and problem-solving directly into the hands of refugees. In Nakivale Refugee Settlement in Uganda—one of the oldest and largest in Africa—refugees are doing far more than surviving. […]
When Refugees Lead, Shelter Solutions Grow: Brick Mold Lending Program Update
From water access to community-led innovation, this program is growing fast. When we launched our Brick Mold Lending Program in Uganda’s Nakivale Refugee Settlement, our goal was simple: to provide newly arrived families with the tools to build a real home, without the crushing cost of brick mold rentals. However, what has happened in the […]
The Hidden Cost of Home—and the Tool That Changes Everything
In the vast, open fields of Nakivale Refugee Settlement in Uganda, rows of white tarps stretch to the horizon. Each one holds a story of loss and hope. Thousands of refugees, most recently fleeing renewed violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo, are arriving with almost nothing. These families face more than just displacement. They’re […]
Restoring Shelter, Restoring Dignity
Imagine waking up in a home not in your ancestral homeland, where the roof leaks when it rains, the walls are cracked, and termites silently eat away at what little structure is left. This is the daily reality for many in households in displacement communities, where “home” means living in constant discomfort, danger, and despair. […]
