Introduction
The month of October was characterised by a respite in fighting across the state of Upper Nile.
This has created opportunities for increased humanitarian access to areas that have been affected by continued fighting or insecurity for the past months such as the counties located on the western bank of the Nile and the counties of the south-eastern portion of the state.
Nevertheless, the humanitarian outlook has yet to improve as the level of access to basic services remains alarmingly low across most sectors.
To inform the response of humanitarian actors working outside of formal displacement sites,
REACH has been conducting an ongoing assessment of hard-to-reach areas in South Sudan since 2015, for which data on settlements across Greater Upper Nile, Greater Equatoria and Western Bahr el Ghazal region is collected on a monthly basis.
In October 2017, REACH interviewed 147 Key Informants (KIs) from 71 settlements in all counties in Upper Nile State except Renk and Maban. In order to ensure an accurate understanding of current displacement and population dynamics, all selected KIs had up-to-date information about the village from which they had been displaced, whether because they had reportedly visited it within the last month or had been in contact with someone living in it within the last month. Findings have been triangulated using four Focus Group Discussions (FGDs) conducted in the Abayok displacement site, interviews with humanitarian actors, secondary data, and previous REACH assessments of hard-to-reach areas of Upper Nile State.
This Situation Overview outlines displacement and access to basic services in Upper Nile in October 2017. The first section analyses displacement trends in Upper Nile State.
The second section outlines the population dynamics in the assessed settlements, as well as access to food and basic services for both IDP and non-displaced communities.
Due to changes in data collection sites from previous months, the areas for which REACH was able to generalise findings at countylevel in October differed from September. In October, REACH has been able to assess over 5% of known settlements in two counties in the western bank of the Nile (Malakal and Panyikang) and two counties in the south-eastern portion of Upper Nile (Nasir and Ulang) (Map 1). Counties where the proportion of total settlements assessed is below 5% are not analysed at the county level, but the settlement data is still included in the state-level analysis.