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Reflecting about the refugee situation in Ukraine prompts us to think about the plight of refugees in our countries. According to the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees Kenya is one of the host countries to refugees in Africa.
Nairobi, Kenya’s capital city, hosts UNHCR’s Regional Bureau for the East, Horn of Africa and Great Lakes Region (EHAGL). The bureau was opened in September 2019 with the aim of bringing decision making closer to the point of delivery.
The Nairobi bureau serves 11 countries. These are Burundi, Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Tanzania and Uganda.
So far Kenya has a total of 539,766 asylum seekers. 234,040 or 43.4% of these are located in Garissa’s Dadaab camp. Turkana’s Kakuma camp comes in second as it hosts 221,749 or 41.1% of asylum seekers. There are 83,977 refugees who reside in Nairobi.
Majority of the asylum seekers are from Somalia (54%) followed by South Sudan (24.5%). Congolese refugees make up (8.9%) while 5.8% of these asylum seekers are Ethiopians. The UNHCR’s report which was released in January 31st says that 67% of the total population of refugees in Kenya come from other nations such as Eritrea, Rwanda, Uganda, Sudan, Burundi, and others.
Economic empowerment
Even as the refugees stay in the camps, the UNHCR has formulated programs that will empower these asylum seekers economically. One of these exceptional programs is the Refugee Agricultural Value chains for Economic Self-reliance (RAVES) Programme.
RAVES is a programme by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) with funding from the IKEA Foundation to enable farmers and also some refugees produce groundnuts for INSTA Products. The programme is a Public Private Partnership with the Turkana County Government and other collaborators such as UNHCR, WFP, IFC, Egerton University, INSTA Products and others.
The four-year project is targeting 1500 farmers of which 30% are refugees. They expect to till 750 acres of land to produce 1200 tons of groundnuts per year. It’s estimated that the produce will generate Ksh 96 million a year.
