Tag: East Africa

Life and opportunity in the world’s biggest refugee camp

An overview of part of the eastern sector of the IFO-2 camp in the sprawling Dadaab refugee camp, north of Nairobi. (Pic: AFP)

Soon after dawn Bashir Bilal sat outside on his usual plastic jerry can surrounded by young girls and boys chanting Quranic verses.

Each child clutched a worn plank of wood instead of an exercise book, writing on it in Arabic script with ink made from charcoal and water.

In Somalia the Islamic madrassa is often the only education on offer, but here in the Dadaab refugee camps it is just the start. Later in the day the children are able to attend, for free, primary and even secondary school while scholarships are available for college education.

Uprooted and dispossessed, life as a refugee is tough. But for the Somalis who have for years, or even decades, called Dadaab home there are opportunities too.

Bilal (47) used to live in Afgoye, a breadbasket town 30 kilometres northwest of the capital Mogadishu. When he came to Dadaab five years ago he found better schooling options than at home where fees were high and children would often spend their days helping out on the family farm.

“Children here in Dadaab have the privilege of better education,” said Bilal. “They will bring change in Somalia when they go back.”

Just when they will go back is contentious. Kenya’s government has hosted refugees from Somalia since 1991 when civil war tore the country apart. Since then Dadaab has grown into the world’s largest refugee settlement, with over 350 000 residents.

Camps seen as a security threat
Kenya now wants the camps shut down claiming they are a security threat used by members of al-Shabab, Somalia’s al-Qaeda branch, for recruitment, training and downtime.

Albert Kimathi, the area’s top government official who, as deputy county commissioner is responsible for security, called Dadaab “the breeding ground, the training ground” for al-Shabab. “They use the camps as safe havens,” he said.

“I’m not branding anyone a terrorist, but quite a number of these terrorists come from Somalia. These people are one and the same,” said Kimathi.

Hopes and dreams

People living in the camps find such allegations perplexing.

Yakub Abdi left the southern city of Kismayo in 2011 after al-Shabab gunmen accused his father of being a spy, and then executed both his parents. He hates and fears the militants and so volunteered to chair a neighbourhood watch group in one of Dadaab’s five camps.

“This is not the place they are recruiting,” said the 29-year old father of two. His 260 fellow volunteers in the Community Peace and Protection Team keep tabs on new arrivals to their camp, reporting anyone suspicious to police.

“Shabab are not here,” said Abdi, but he warned that the invisible, largely unprotected border just 80 kilometres to the east, meant they were not far away either.

Despite living in temporary shelters and barely subsisting on food handouts, Dadaab is not a place of universal misery and hopelessness.

“People think there’s no life in the camps, but there is life,” said Liban Mohamed, a 28-year old filmmaker from Kismayo, in southern Somalia. “There are problems here but there are also hopes and dreams.”

Mohamed’s dream is to be resettled in the US where his mother and siblings already live, and to continue making films. For others the dream is closer to home, and nearer to being realised.

Mohamed Osman is a trained medical officer who for the last 15 years has provided free consultations, affordable drugs and in-patient treatment at his private pharmacy. He left Somalia in 1992 seeking safety and prosperity and in Dadaab, his family and business have thrived.

“Children in Somalia have no hope,” said the 42-year old father of 12 children from two wives. “My children are learning here.” He has no desire to return to Somalia because “there is still fighting there”.

A short way from Osman’s pharmacy, along flooded and uneven dirt roads, the daily delivery of khat, a herb with a mildly narcotic effect when chewed, was unloaded.

A broker who runs four pick-ups piled high with 50-kilogramme sacks of khat into Dadaab every day said he sells out his entire stock without fail, making more than 30 000 shillings (280 euros) on each truck.

Traders deliver khat to the market at IFO main camp of the Dadaab refugee camp. (Pic: AFP)

In a frenzy of activity the retailers, including 43-year old Fatima Ahmed, split the sacks open on the ground sorting the vivid green shrub into kilo bunches. Prices are seasonal and low during the current rainy period, but still, Ahmed said, she buys at 100 shillings (1 euro) and sells at 150 shillings (1.40 euro) making a modest daily income. “It’s a good business,” Ahmed said.

Sellers’ profits are ploughed back into Dadaab’s thriving economy which, according to a 2010 study, is worth around $25 million (22m euros) a year. The research, commissioned by Kenya’s Department of Refugee Affairs, found that Dadaab also earned the nearby non-refugee, or host, community $14m (13m euros) a year in trade and contracts.

Mini Dubai

Each camp has its own market but Hagadera is the most established. A Kenyan official described it as “a mini Dubai”.

A Somali refugee shops for fresh produce at a market within the Hagadera camp of Dadaab. (Pic: AFP)

There are hotels and restaurants selling grilled camel meat, chilli hot samosas and spiced tea with camel milk, general stores with shelves of pasta, rice, milk powder and sugar – much of it smuggled in from Somalia and sold at a steep discount – electronics shops with the latest smartphones, narrow alleys stuffed with stalls selling new and secondhand clothes, fabrics and shoes and shady passages lined with tarpaulins piled with mangos, avocadoes, potatoes and onions.

Ali Saha, a 23-year old university graduate who runs a cyber café, said he wants to return to Somalia, just not yet.

“Education is a privilege and from that angle being a refugee is not that bad,” he said. “I should return so I can help my community in Somalia but I need to go back when my country is stable.”

10 years ago

‘No room’ for gays in Kenya, says deputy president

(Pic: Reuters)

Kenya’s deputy president, William Ruto, has told worshippers at a church service in Nairobi that homosexuality had no place in the east African nation, reports said on Monday.

Homophobia is on the rise across much of Africa and homosexuality remains illegal in many countries, including Kenya where it was outlawed under British colonial legislation.

“We will not allow homosexuality in our society as it violates our religious and cultural beliefs,” Ruto was quoted as telling a cheering congregation at the Jesus Winner Ministry Church on the outskirts of the capital.

“We will stand with religious leaders to defend our faith and our beliefs,” he said. “There’s no room for homosexuality in this country. That one I can assure you.”

Ruto’s comments came as US Secretary of State John Kerry visited Kenya. Asked to react to the reported comments, Kerry reiterated Washington’s position.

“The US believes that all people are created equal and all people have rights, that includes people of every faith, every gender, every choice of partner, no matter who you love,” he told reporters.

Ruto, who is on trial at the International Criminal in The Hague accused of crimes against humanity, said his stance was about morality not politics.

“When we say this, we are not saying so as to get votes but to protect what we all believe is right,” he said, according to The Star newspaper.

In conservative Christian and Muslim countries in Africa, homophobia is a vote-winner.

In Uganda legislators sought the death penalty for homosexuality and although the anti-gay bill has since been watered down, ruling party MPs remain eager to see it passed.

Nigeria and Gambia have passed tough new anti-gay laws in recent years, with Gambia’s President Yahya Jammeh, calling homosexuals “ungodly, Satanic… vermins [sic]” in a speech last year.

Homosexuality is illegal in 36 out of 54 African countries and punishable by death in four, according to human rights group Amnesty International.

In Kenya, too, a cross-party parliamentary group is seeking stricter application of existing anti-gay legislation.

Binyavanga Wainaina, a prominent Kenyan writer who last year came out as gay, took to social media to attack Ruto’s comments.

“Our Deputy President Ruto is building himself to be the most dangerous man in Africa. If his strategy works much will burn,” Wainaina told his 18 000 followers on Twitter.

The Jesus Winner Ministry Church specialises in prophecies and describes itself on its website as “an oasis” for people “under the yoke of curses, witchcraft, stagnation, ancestral spirits and other evils brought by Satan.”

It is popular with Kenya’s political elite.

10 years ago

Kenya demands UN remove Somali refugee camp after Garissa attack

An aerial view shows an extension of the Ifo camp, one of several refugee settlements in Dadaab. (Pic: Reuters)

Kenya has given the United Nations three months to remove a camp housing more than half a million Somali refugees, as part of a get-tough response to the killing of 148 people by Somali gunmen at a Kenyan university.

Kenya has in the past accused Islamist militants of hiding out in Dadaab camp which it now wants the UN refugee agency UNHCR to move across the border to inside Somalia.

“We have asked the UNHCR to relocate the refugees in three months, failure to which we shall relocate them ourselves,” Deputy President William Ruto said in a statement on Saturday.

“The way America changed after 9/11 is the way Kenya will change after Garissa,” he said, referring to the university that was attacked on April 2.

Emmanuel Nyabera, spokesperson for the UNHCR in Kenya, said they were yet to receive formal communication from the government on the relocation of Dadaab and could not comment.

The complex of camps hosts more than 600 000 Somali refugees, according to Ruto, in a remote, dry corner in northeast Kenya, about an hour’s drive from Garissa town.

The camp was first established in 1991 when civil war broke out in neighbouring Somalia, and over subsequent years has received waves of refugees fleeing conflict and drought.

The United Nations puts the number of registered refugees in the chronically overcrowded settlements of permanent structures, mud shanties and tents, at around 335 000. The camp houses schools, clinics and community centres.

Macharia Munene, professor of international relations at USIU-Africa, said the logistics of moving hundreds of thousands of refugees across the border would be “a tall order”.

But he said there were now safe areas within Somalia from where Islamist al Shabab militants had been chased out by African Union forces in recent years.

“Kenya is in an emergency situation… Each country has an obligation to look after its people first,” he told Reuters.

‘We must secure this country at all costs’
Funerals of the students killed in the campus attack were taking place across the country. Pictures of their grieving families dominated the media, reminding Kenyans of the attack.

Ruto said Kenya had started building a 700-km wall along the entire length of the border with Somalia to keep out members of al Shabab.

“We must secure this country at whatever cost, even if we lose business with Somalia, so be it,” he said.

On Tuesday, Kenya closed 13 informal money remittance firms, hawalas, to cut off funding to suspected radicals. Ruto said any business that collaborated with al Shabab would be shut down.

Al Shabab has killed more than 400 people on Kenyan soil in the last two years, including 67 during a siege at Nairobi’s Westgate mall in 2013, damaging tourism and inward investment.

On Monday, the Kenyan air force launched air strikes against al Shabab targets in Somalia, a country where it has been militarily engaged against the Islamists for several years.

10 years ago

Kenya’s transgender warrior: From suicide bid to celebrity

Audrey Mbugua. (Pic: Reuters)

Audrey Mbugua will not say whether it was a razor blade, pills or carbon monoxide that she used to try to kill herself.

Born a male in Kenya and given the name Andrew, she felt trapped in the wrong body and started dressing in women’s clothes while at university, attracting ridicule and rejection. After graduation, Mbugua was jobless, penniless and alone.

“I thought the best way was to end it all,” she recalled six years later, sitting in her leafy garden in Kiambu, 20km from the Kenyan capital, Nairobi.

“I didn’t have any hope. I didn’t have friends I could talk to. My family had deserted me,” said the slim 31-year-old, who wears glasses and her hair long.

Experts say up to 1 percent of the world’s population are transgender – men and women who feel they have been born with the wrong body and the wrong gender.

When Mbugua sought help to deal with her inner turmoil from a healthworker, the woman took Mbugua’s hands and prayed for her to be freed from the devil’s clutches.

“She pulls open her drawer, takes out a Bible and starts to preach to me,” Mbugua laughed. “I don’t think she knew what I was going through, so to cover up, she said it’s the work of Satan.”

Transgender people are some of the most invisible in Africa where rigid gender stereotyping continues to stifle freedoms. Many are forced to hide their identity and live on the margins of their communities or risk being vilified as immoral and unchristian by the conservative majority.

Mbugua is a rare exception.

Since a test case in 2013 to compel Kenya’s examinations council to change the name on her school leaving certificate from Andrew to Audrey, Mbugua has become an unlikely celebrity, using interviews to promote transgender rights.

Surgery
After Mbugua’s 2008 suicide attempt, doctors diagnosed her with gender identity disorder and arranged for surgery to change her sex.

But Kenya’s minister of medical services cancelled the operation at the last minute without explanation – an example of the confusion that has marred her quest to fully become a woman.

Facing one hurdle after another, Mbugua decided she had to take up the mantle of campaigning for transgender rights to combat the ignorance and stigma blighting her life.

“It has to be done so that people are able to live lives that are full of dignity, where people are not hindered from being who they are,” Mbugua said.

Transgender people across Africa are publicly humiliated, stripped, harassed by the police and thrown out of their homes. Alcoholism and suicide are often the only way out.

“A transgender person should be a prostitute, they should be used for sodomy – that is the general narrative,” Mbugua said.

Despite a degree in biotechnology, Mbugua has been unable to find work. She has had a dozen job interviews, but the interviewers made “nasty comments” and threatened to take her academic certificates to the police, accusing her of fraud.

Mbugua changed her name through deed poll in 2012, using this to replace Andrew with Audrey on her passport.

But she has been unable to change the name on her identity card, birth certificate or academic papers. An application to change her identity card has been pending since 2012.

Her 2013 case against Kenya’s examinations council unleashed a media frenzy with her story dominating front pages. Television interviewers asked her about her sex life, she was mocked online and young men in her village threatened to attack her.

“You feel like throwing yourself in front of the bus but you have to find a way of living with it,” she said. “I wanted to take as many hits as possible and show the world that you can hit a transsexual and she stands up.”

“I didn’t want people to think of people like me as cowards, as people who hide, who are ashamed of themselves,” she added.

In a landmark ruling in October, the court ordered the examinations council to change the name on Mbugua’s certificate. But the council appealed the ruling and the case is awaiting a date in the High Court.

Fundamental change?
South Africa and Botswana are the only African countries with laws explicitly allowing official documents to be changed to reflect a person’s desired identity, although medical evidence of transition is usually required.

Kenyan authorities say medical proof of transition – a sex change – is required to change the gender mark on Mbugua’s passport and identity card. But sex change surgery is virtually impossible to get in Kenya because the procedure is so unusual.

The few Kenyans Mbugua knows who have had surgery did it overseas.

In February, the High Court ruled against ordering the government to set medical guidelines for treatment of gender identity disorder, which must be in place before Mbugua can undergo surgery.

“Gender change operation is part of my treatment,” she said. “It’s the last piece of my treatment as recommended by doctors who saw me. It’s my right.”

Mbugua has become Kenya’s most famous transgender woman. Strangers stop her in the street and tell her she is brave and beautiful. She receives emails from doctors asking her to help transgender patients change their names on official documents.

She juggles her advocacy work with studying for a Masters degree, spending hours at her computer, blue and black nail polishes neatly lined up next to the screen.

She believes Kenyans are now more understanding of what it is to be transgender, accepting it as a medical condition that has nothing to do with homosexuality, which remains a taboo in much of Africa.

“Nowadays, I normally have a good night’s sleep because no one calls me that they have been arrested by city council or police on some trumped-up charges of cross-dressing or prostitution,” she said. “We have seen fundamental changes.”

10 years ago

Water pans offer lifeline to female farmers in Kenya

Kenyan farmers pick through their maize crop in a field in the village of Kapsimatwa near the Rift Valley town of Bomet. (Pic: AFP)

It’s mid-morning and the sun is blazing. It is so hot that germinating seeds struggle to grow.

In Moi Ndabi, about 44km south of Kenya’s Lake Naivasha in Nakuru County, the vegetation dotted sparingly across the village has turned yellow.

More than 100 people have lined up at the Moi Ndabi borehole to wait their turn to fetch water sold at five Kenyan shillings ($0.05) per 20-litre jerry can.

But about 12km away from the water point in this region of the Rift Valley two greenhouses of different sizes stand adjacent to the homestead of Zainabu Malicha. By the end of March, she hopes to have pocketed at least 1.2m shillings ($13 100) from the sale of the tomatoes she grows there.

For the widow who is now solely responsible for the care of her five children, this venture into agribusiness has transformed her life, which for much of the last two decades has been dominated by hunger, poverty and malnutrition.

“Living in this semi-arid area [used to mean] no viable farming activity,” she says.

Malicha’s business venture relies on a simple water-harvesting technology: a water pan. Constructing the pan – a circular container 20m across – involves digging a dam and covering it with a dam liner. The pan then stores the runoff water during the heavy rains. Once full, it can provide enough water for Malicha for up to four months until the next rainy season.

“Before 2011, when the water pan was constructed, life was hard. Extremely hard. Maize would fail due to [the] scorching sun. Vegetables withered every so often. Going to sleep hungry was common,” Malicha says.

Having made 600 000 shillings ($6 500) from produce grown in the smaller greenhouse, Malicha used the proceeds to set up the bigger one. “I have so much joy now because I can comfortably feed my children with [a] balanced diet and meet the education expenses,” she says.

A few miles from her homestead, Florence Muthoni is also enjoying the fruits of the water reservoir.

Having access to a greenhouse has enabled her to grow watermelons, a crop she once attempted and failed to grow on her hectare (2.5 acres) of land.

“After two months, I harvest and make 135 000 shillings ($1 475). This is good enough to pay for my two sons on parallel programmes in local universities,” says the widow, who has lived in the area since 1992.

On a separate half-hectare of land she has also grown vegetables, some bananas and sugarcane, made possible through using water pans.

“I plan to buy a plot and then rear two Friesian cows. This could raise my profits, and when I finally become old, my children would take over,” she says.

Having the water pan, Muthoni says, has emancipated her from hunger and “opened up her mind to hope for great things” not just for herself but for other women in the village.

Muthoni and Malicha now lead a group of 286 women who form the Chemi Chemi ya Tumaini Jangwani Women Group (Springs of Hope in the Desert Women Group) as chair and secretary respectively.

Even though the water pans led to solutions to the problems of food scarcity and related health issues, their construction was possible only with the assistance of an NGO.

Muthoni says the NGO spent 20m shillings ($200 000) on setting up 50 water pans in the area for the women to irrigate their farms. The amount includes the 560 000 shillings used for their smaller greenhouses.

“We hear the government has loans for women, but how to get them is what we do not know. If it wasn’t for the NGO, we could still be suffering in hunger,” says Muthoni. “We need people to reach out to us in the villages and give us a sense of direction, just like non-governmental organisations do.”

The Kenya Institute of Economic Affairs report (2014), Public Spending in Agriculture in Kenya: Is It Beneficial to Small Scale Women Farmers? (pdf), notes the increasing importance of NGOs as a source of credit to farmers in the country. Although women are the backbone of the agricultural sector, the report showed that many of them had not benefited from agricultural credit.

Worryingly, the lack of gender-disaggregated information on credit beneficiaries continues to hamper balanced distribution of available resources, it says. Despite the creation of government funds specifically for women, only a few have benefited from them. Women make up more than half of Kenya’s population of 44 million.

Through community groups, women can access money from the Women Enterprise Fund , established in 2007, and the Uwezo Fund , launched in 2013. So far 707 435 women have received funding from the WEF while 274 857 have been trained in business management skills, according to statistics from the Ministry of Devolution and Planning.