How do we make life better for people living as refugees for generations?

Thursday May 5, 2016

Humanitarian funding increasingly has to be about meeting long-term needs. How do we make sure lives are not put on hold?

Newly arrived refugees queue outside Dagahaley refugee camp reception centre, to be registered and receive food and other aid. Photograph: J Brouwer/UNHCR

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It was once just a remote, semi-arid area of north-eastern Kenya, a nowhere land where droughts were frequent and visitors rare. But a quarter of a century after the first refugee camps were constructed in Dadaab, it has become the third largest population centre in the country and the largest refugee camp in the world.

The camp was set up to receive people escaping the civil war in Somalia. Thousands more people arrived following severe drought in Somalia in 2011. Twenty-five years on, Dadaab – which now consists of five camps and hosts nearly 330,000 people – is a glaring example of the trend towards protracted refugee situations.

According to the UN refugee agency, UNHCR, by 1993 the average refugee crisis was lasting for nine years (pdf). A decade later, that had risen to 17 years. Long-term refugee life is becoming a new type of humanitarian phenomenon, driven by complex crises such as those in Syria, Yemen and Ethiopia.

Conflict in the east of the Democratic Republic of the Congo has prompted more than 450,000 citizens to flee to neighbouring countries, even as DRC deals with an influx of refugees from Burundi and Central African Republic. Fighting in Somalia has forced Somalis to seek shelter in Kenya, including in the Dadaab complex.

In Dadaab, we are witnessing not only one generation of young people born in the camp and growing up in exile, but now their children. Without greater efforts by the international community, their grandchildren will face life as refugees. For generations of people here, it is the norm to have food weighed out by the pound every month. Their “government” and “law-makers” are the UN and humanitarian organisations such as Care.

Protracted crises force the aid community to rethink some of our core principles of humanitarian response. It is no longer a case of just providing lifesaving aid – water, food and shelter – for a few months.

With generations now growing up as refugees, aid agencies need to provide structures, opportunities and inspiration within the restricted context of the camp. Organisations have to look at programming years down the line, at how to ensure new generations have necessary skills and education to get by outside a camp and, perhaps most crucially for those spending prolonged periods of time in exile, how to maintain hope.

Ideally, refugees should participate in the design of the camp and help run it. Care has made this a priority. Of our nearly 2,000 staff in Dadaab, 90% are refugees. Not only does this offer employment and training, it also provides people with a sense of ownership and purpose.

The continuing need for a refugee camp, 25 years on, leaves little to celebrate, but there are achievements to be recognised. Girls in the camp now have greater access to primary, secondary and limited tertiary education.

When the camp was established in 1991, girls made up only 5% of the total number of children in education in Dadaab (UNHCR figures); there is now an almost 50:50 girl-boy ratio at primary schools.

In Somali culture, girls are often expected to stay at home, marry and look after the household, so this is a great achievement – not only for those girls living in the camp, but also for the future of Somalia. In total, 41% of the camp’s children are in primary education, according to Unicef, although the figure falls to 8.5% for those in secondary schools.

Yet a durable and comprehensive solution to Dadaab is needed urgently. One of these is the voluntary return of Somali refugees from Dadaab, but this should only be done when and where it is safe and possible to do so. We also need to remain realistic: with the ongoing instability and the long-term rehabilitation needs of Somalia, it’s likely that there will continue to be a need for a safe space for Somalis and refugees of other nationalities within Kenya and we should preserve this.

May’s world humanitarian summit in Istanbul must be a turning point for the way the world responds to, and acts to prevent, humanitarian disasters.

World leaders need to agree and act on key priorities: a better system for finding political solutions to conflicts; tearing down an often artificial divide between long-term aid and humanitarian assistance; and ensuring that people affected by crises are themselves able to participate in the planning and delivery of emergency assistance.

We need to ensure that countries who enact basic humanitarian principles by receiving significant numbers of refugees, as illustrated by Dadaab, can give those refugees access to education and jobs, so that their lives are not merely put on hold for years on end.

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