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Concerns in the six most populated refugee camps

Executive Summary

Migration and forced displacement are two of the major global humanitarian crises facing our world today. The United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) is a global UN agency that works closely with governments and aid organizations to set up camps for refugees and displaced people. According to reports released by the UNHCR in February 2017, a record 65.6 million people are either refugees, asylum seekers or internally displaced across the globe.

Ensuring safe shelters that offer privacy, fair food distribution systems and separate sanitation facilities are vital to the health and living conditions of refugees. Refugee camps are getting more and more congested with new waves of settlements every year leading to deteriorating health and sanitary conditions. Women and children are the most vulnerable sections amongst refugee populations.

Context

There are more refugees and displaced people in camps today than ever before in the human history. With growing reluctance from Europe, developing countries bear the daunting brunt of hosting majority of these refugee populations. Kenya is home to four of the six most populated refugee camps in the world. Kakuma Refugee Camp (Kenya), Hagadera Refugee Camp (Kenya), Dagahaley (Kenya), Ifo (Kenya), Zaatari (Jordan) and Yida (South Sudan) are the six largest refugee camps.

The Kakuma Refugee Camp, home to over 200,000 refugees, is largest refugee camp in the world. The camp was established in 1992 in Northwestern Kenya following a string of civil wars in the most volatile region in Africa. The camp predominantly hosts refugees from South Sudan, Somalia and Ethiopia. According to UNHCR reports published in May 2017, 47% of refugees at Kakuma Refugee camp are women. There have been several reports of sexual and physical violence at the camp. In November 2014, eight refugees from Burundi, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), and South Sudan died in a violent incident after an attempted rape of a refugee girl sparked fighting among rival youth groups. 1

The Hagadera Refugee Camp is the second largest camp with an estimated refugee population of 239,545. The camp was established in 1991 following a civil war in Somalia. Over 95% of refugees stationed at the camp are Somalis. According to UNHCR figures, over half of refugees at this camp are women. The Kenyan government has repeatedly threatened to shut down the camp as the camp has been congested with a fresh influx of refugees from Somalia due to famine and drought. The Kenyan government alleges that the camp is serving as a breeding ground for potential terrorists and a hotbed for violence. 2

Dagahaley is the third largest camp with over half of its 90,000 refugees being women. The camp was established in 1992. There have been several outbreaks of malaria and contagious diseases such as diarrhea at the camp since. The camp is heavily congested and poor in sanitary conditions.

Established in 1991, Ifo is the oldest of the five refugee camps in Dadaab, currently accommodating refugees from ten countries. The camp is home to over 84,089 refugees from across the region. Women make up about 52% of its refugee population. The camp has eight primary schools and two secondary schools as well as an adult literacy centre and a youth

vocational center. However, there have been high drop-out rates due to limited funding to support children of refugees. Moreover, access to safe drinking water and sanitation has been restricted due to logistical issues as the camp is remote from urban areas.

Zaatari camp in Jordan is the fifth largest camp in the world with close to 80,000 refugees primarily from Syria. The camp was established in 2012 following the Syrian civil war. Half of the refugee population at the camp are women. There have been concerns over the safety of women refugees following reports of sexual and physical violence in recent years. The camp has two hospitals, 9 schools, over 3,000 refugee-owned shops, a circus academy, a soccer league, and various recreational amenities.

Yida is the sixth most populous camp with over 70,000 refugees, predominantly South Sudanese. 52% of the refugees are female with women and children representing 82% of the total population. The camp is notorious for prevalent sexual and physical violence particularly targeting women and young girls. Poor security for girls and women has paved the way for dozens of rape incidents and abductions. The UN had issued a decision to shut down the camp in 2016 to discourage further migration but the refugees refused to leave because they had nowhere else to go. 3

Recommendations

The UNHCR must pursue the following course of action in light of the deepening global refugee crises and deteriorating living conditions and security at refugee camps:

·        Tighten up security at refugee camps to stifle sexual and physical violence, kidnappings and abductions of young girls and women;

·        Forge effective partnerships with respective governments and aid organizations to better equip their humanitarian staff on the ground;

·        Provide refugees and particularly girls access to education, healthcare and other services to speed up the reintegration of refugees into community life;

·        Provide counseling and contraception services to help with rehabilitation of victims of sexual violence;

References

1.     The United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), Violent incidents at Kenya’s Kakuma refugee camp claim eight lives over past week, dated November 2014, http://www.unhcr.org/en-us/news/briefing/2014/11/5458b7969/violent-incidents-kenyas-kakuma-refugee-camp-claim-eight-lives-past-week.html

2.     CNN, Kenya to appeal court block on closure of world's largest refugee camp, dated February 2017, http://www.cnn.com/2017/02/09/africa/kenya-dadaab-refugee-camp/index.html

3.     News Deeply, The Refugee Camp That Lives on in Limbo, dated July 2016, https://www.newsdeeply.com/refugees/articles/2016/07/06/the-refugee-camp-that-lives-on-in-limbo

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How Technology Can Drive Inclusion In Education

 Inclusive education is a system of education that accommodates various physical, emotional and mental development factors that impact the learning process. Amongst common factors that impact the learning process are differences in learning styles and maturity levels, accessibility needs and cultural and linguistic language barriers. According to Open Society Foundations, “Inclusive education values diversity and the unique contributions each student brings to the classroom. In a truly inclusive setting, every child feels safe and has a sense of belonging.”1 Technology has had a strong impact on the way people learn by providing new ways of collaboration, interaction and experiences and will prove to be a powerful tool of inclusive education.

Online education enabled by advancements in cutting-edge technology has been a game changer in the march towards inclusive education in recent years. Online lectures, assignments, projects and exams allow students to proceed with a course at their own pace and convenience in terms of schedule and accessibility. According to the U.S. Department of Education, technology ushers in fundamental structural changes that can be integral to achieving significant improvements in productivity, supports learning 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, builds 21st century skills and increases student engagement and motivation and accelerates learning.2 As technology provides more and more ways to learn, barriers to education vanish and hence our education system gets more and more inclusive to those with disability and accessibility needs.

Online education offers flexibility to students with jobs and family responsibilities as opposed to traditional education, which requires a great deal of time commitment. Online education is particularly useful to nontraditional students who often have to juggle job duties and social life with family responsibilities. The flexibility online education offers allows students encourages the enrolment of nontraditional students including working students, married students, and students with other time commitments. This will in turn enhance student engagement and productivity in a course as greater flexibility improves concentration. However, critics of online education rightly argue that the face-to-face interaction with teachers, which is an important element of education, will be missed in online education.

Social media has revolutionized information flow and knowledge transfer rates in recent years particularly for millennials. With the collaborative workspace and content sharing functionalities social media platforms offer, the traditional narrative of formal education in classrooms is now fast becoming a thing of the past. According to an article about social media by the Education Partners, “the sense of community it fosters among students, and the ability for students and professors to share information with each other” makes social media particularly instrumental as an educational tool in an online classroom.3 Social media, by its nature, is a collaborative environment which, in an educational context, could be leveraged by students as a platform to collaborate on a task, critique, evaluate and comment on each other’s assignments. Moreover, social media could be used to plan events, make announcements, share videos of solutions to questions and conduct polls and surveys conveniently. The fact that social media is easily accessible and cheap makes it a powerful tool of inclusive education. Therefore, social media could be a hidden gem that, if wisely and properly tapped into by educational institutions, could make way for an inclusive educational system.

The emergence of collaborative online platforms such as Slack and Question and Answer(Q&A) sites such as Quora paves the way for more inclusive and innovative educational systems and adds new dynamics to the learning process. Online collaborative workspaces such as Lucid chart, Google Drive and Titan Pad allow students to easily collaborate on one document remotely in real time, which makes the learning process more inclusive to students who cannot physically attend in-class lectures. On the other hand, collaborative online platforms such as Slack, Asana and Flock foster collaboration and communication among distantly located members of a learning group. Such online platforms allow students to quickly and informally communicate through group chat, raise various issues and effortlessly share files, documents and information. Therefore, collaborative online platforms help ensure inclusion and diversity in education systems for students with various accessibility needs.

With every new innovative way of learning technology ushers in, more and more sections of marginalized communities and nontraditional students will be able find a seat at the education table. Students with disabilities and accessibility needs and nontraditional students are particularly empowered by modern and dynamic ways of learning. The introduction of social media and collaborative online platforms open up innovative ways of learning and pave the way for an inclusive education system affordable and accessible to all regardless of distance, disabilities and backgrounds.

References

Open Society Foundations, “The Value of Inclusive Education”, Oct 2015. https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/explainers/value-inclusive-education

U.S. Department of Education, “Use of Technology in Teaching and Learning”, N.D.

https://www.ed.gov/oii-news/use-technology-teaching-and-learning

The Education Partners, “Social Media as an Educational Tool”, Sept 14, 2015.

http://blog.theeducationpartners.com/social-media-as-an-educational-tool