It is well documented that across the Horn of Africa people are starving. A series of factors including wars, droughts, and food speculation on the part of large Banks (both in Europe and the United States) and Wall Street firms have contributed to the plight of more than ten million people now in serious need.
The United Nations has repeatedly issued warnings of famine and in the interval between those warnings more and more of Africa is slipping into famine. Unfortunately, the warnings of devastation around the designated famine areas often neglects the fact that the situation is creating a mass population of refugees. In Somalia, with their livestock dead or dying and their crops failing, people are walking long miles over the course of many weeks to refugee camps in Kenya and Ethiopia. Sometimes parents arrive without the children who have died along the way. Sometimes only the children survive the trek and arrive as orphans. Either way those arriving at the camps are malnourished, weak, frightened and on the verge of death.
They come to the camps as a last resort looking for hope, but unfortunately there is more than likely not even hope to be found there. Some do not survive while they are being given medical attention. Often there is not enough medicine to go around.
The United Nations estimates that $ 1.5 billion is needed in aid. As of now only half that much has been raised.
Now, there is the added danger that the refugee camps are overflowing and losing what little effectiveness they once offered. In Ethiopia, 2,000 people a day are arriving at the Dolo Ado refugee camp which is struggling to keep pace. This compounds a food crisis faced by almost 7 million Kenyans and Ethiopians at home. In Djibouti and Eritrea, tens of thousands of people are also in need. In Kenya it is estimated that 1,500 Somali refugees are entering that country every day.
The largest refugee camp in the world, Dadaab, is already dangerously over-crowded with some 400,000 refugees. Many thousands more are waiting to be registered. The overcrowded Dadaab camp cannot accommodate them. In fact, the Dadab camp was declared full in 2008. Now, three years after being deemed full, a constant flow of refugees has overwhelmed what little room was left.
The Dadaab camp, opened in 1991, was designed to hold 90,000 refugees. It was opened at that time to be a temporary shelter for those fleeing from the Somalia civil war. Now, twenty years later, the camp contains over four times the amount of refugees it was designed for, and the population grows every day.
Over 60,000 refugees have been forced to resort to cardboard shelters or make-shift plastic tents on land, prone to flooding, located off of the camp area.
The fear now is that Dadaab is becoming a permanent settlement.
The Kenyan government has asked for refugee camps to be built to house people inside Somalia, instead of expanding Dadaab. The U.N. World Food Program, however, has determined that it cannot access the over two million malnourished people in rebel-controlled territory in southern Somalia.
The overcrowding of refugee camps is widespread. The camp at Sherkole has reached its full capacity with 8,000 refugees. Four new camps have opened in Ethipoia at Bokolmanyo, Melkadida, Awbarre, and Sheder. A fifth camp is planned for Genele when necessary. On the Ethiopian border at the Dolo Ado camp there are over 100,000 refugees. A transit center at Dolo Ado has now moved some 15,000 refugees to a new camp at Hilaweyn
In a partial solution the United Nations has recently opened a new camp in western Ethiopia as hostilities in Sudan’s Blue Nile state continue to drive thousands to flee the country. The camp is located in Tongo, Ethiopia and refugees have already begun arriving. In a little over a month over 27,000 refugees have fled Blue Nile to Ethiopia and South Sudan, while fighting continues between the Sudanese army and the rebels of the Sudan Peoples Liberation Army. The Tongo camp is built to hold 3,000 people with the possibility of expansion. If the trend of the other camps holds true the Tongo camp will soon go over capacity.
Besides the devastation caused by famine we are now facing a humanitarian crisis in the refugee camps. The fact that Dadaab, the world’s largest camp, has now been in existence for twenty years sums up the sad truth that not enough has been done or is being done to solve either the root problem of famine or the end result of the refugee situation.
In the meantime people die in the Horn of Africa every day.