Dadaab - 20 years on

Not all of the people living in the Dadaab camps arrived there as refugees. The compound is also home to some 10,000 third-generation refugees whose parents were also born in the camps.

Twenty years on from when it was first set up, the Dadaab refugee complex in northern Kenya houses close to half a million people. It was designed to host 90,000.

Twenty years on, and three generations later, the international community still defines a refugee situation as 'temporary'. Whilst we're dealing with semantics, I'll also mention that all funding is labelled aid; development - and therefore what is termed development assistance - is viewed as incompatible with such a sprawling complex. I talked of the progress required in refugee education in a previous post, and in the case of Dadaab, security issues remain the biggest challenge to providing sufficient assistance.

Twenty years on, repatriation remains the 'durable solution' advocated by UNHCR.

(Quote source: http://www.devex.com/en/news/dadaab-turns-20/77563)