Amuna Vivian

Amuna Vivian is a South Sudanese refugee who was among the first volunteers to join YSAT when John Jal Dak founded the organisation in 2016. In those early days, she brought something rare and essential: lived experience of displacement, a deep commitment to community-led change, and the willingness to build something from nothing alongside a team that shared her conviction that displaced people deserve to lead their own development.

Today, Amuna serves as Head of Gender and Protection at YSAT, leading the organisation's work on education and child protection across Rhino Camp Refugee Settlement. She is responsible for ensuring that children in some of Uganda's most challenging displacement contexts have access to safe, inclusive, and quality education, and that the systems protecting their rights and wellbeing are continuously strengthened.

She oversees the planning, implementation, and monitoring of education initiatives, coordinating with school administrators, teachers, and community stakeholders to improve learning environments, embed child safeguarding practices, and deliver psychosocial support for learners. She holds a Bachelor's degree in Social Work and Social Administration from Bugema University, and brings strong expertise in project design, reporting, gender and protection, and stakeholder engagement.

Her academic grounding in social work, combined with years of direct field experience inside Rhino Camp, gives her a rare dual fluency — she understands both the technical frameworks that govern child protection and education programming, and the lived realities of the families and children those frameworks are meant to serve.

What no job title fully captures is the continuity Amuna represents. She was present when YSAT had no formal structure, no external funding, and no guarantee of what it would become. That early commitment and the faith-driven, community-rooted leadership she has carried through every year continues to shape the culture and quality of YSAT's work today.