Gulu

Gulu is a city in Uganda's Northern Region and the commercial and administrative center of Gulu District, about 333 kilometers from the capital Kampala and 321 kilometers south of Juba in South Sudan. Its population was 233,271 at the 2024 census. Northern Uganda was deliberately underdeveloped under British colonial rule, and from the 1990s the region was devastated by the Lord's Resistance Army insurgency; at its worst, as many as 15,000 children known as "night commuters" fled into Gulu each evening for safety, and a 1996 government relocation order displaced about two million people into camps that were not closed until April 2009. The city is now a transport hub on the Uganda-South Sudan corridor and home to Gulu University and one of Uganda's nine accredited medical schools.