Kakuma Refugee Camp

Chronic violence has characterized Somalia for over two decades, forcing nearly two million people to flee. A significant number have settled in camps in neighboring countries, where children were born and raised. Based on in-depth fieldwork, this book explores the experience of Somalis who grew up in Kakuma refugee camp, in Kenya, and are now young adults. This original study carefully considers how young people perceive their living environment and how growing up in exile structures their view of the past and their country of origin, and the future and its possibilities.

Kenya’s Kakuma refugee camp is one of the world’s largest, home to over 100,000 people drawn from across east and central Africa. Though notionally still a ‘temporary’ camp, it has become a permanent urban space in all but name with businesses, schools, a hospital and its own court system. Such places, Bram J. Jansen argues, should be recognised as ‘accidental cities’, a unique form of urbanization that has so far been overlooked by scholars. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, Jansen’s book explores the dynamics of everyday life in such accidental cities. The result is a holistic socio-economic picture, moving beyond the conventional view of such spaces as transitory and desolate to demonstrate how their inhabitants can develop a permanent society and a distinctive identity. Crucially, the book offers important insights into one of the greatest challenges facing humanitarian and international development workers: how we might develop more effective strategies for managing refugee camps in the global South and beyond. An original take on African urbanism, Kakuma Refugee Camp will appeal to practitioners and academics across the social sciences interested in social and economic issues increasingly at the heart of contemporary development.

The World According to Girls At a time when the U.K. and parts of the U.S. are turning their backs on immigrants fleeing from hardship and danger, this inspiring book will appeal to Canadian teens and their mothers who feel proud to live in a country that still opens its doors to the world. There is a deep well of caring in Canada about the plight of refugees and of girls in developing countries who are denied the opportunity for an education. This beautifully designed and photographed book taps into that national interest by portraying, in vivid pictures and words, the lives of over a dozen courageous teenage girls of Kakuma Refugee Camp in northwestern Kenya. The girls, who travelled to Kakuma from five different African countries, talk about what it?s like to escape from violence, build a new life, go to high school and dream big for the future. They have to deal with the risk of assault and the gritty boredom of life in a refugee camp, and yet they delight in the same things as girls everywhere. The 17-year-old author will participate in a national PR campaign, including national newspapers, magazines, television and radio, discussing the friendship between the girls in her high school and the girls in Kakuma, as expressed through their touching correspondence.

What is education for an unknowable future? In Educating for Durable Solutions, Christine Monaghan explores how refugees and policymakers have answered this question over time by reconstructing the contemporary history of education in Kenya's Dadaab and Kakuma refugee camps. Through oral histories and archival research, Monaghan shows how, since the founding of both camps in 1991, refugees and policymakers have conceptualized, developed, implemented and changed refugee education programs. She also shows why and how, despite these changes, real challenges persist in refugee education in Dadaab, Kakuma, and other camps throughout the world; these include high numbers of out-of-school children and youth, high student to teacher ratios, unpredictable funding, and persistent questions regarding what refugee education is for. The author shifts focus from debates over the impacts of specific policies and programs and explores instead how and why different policies and programs were implemented whether they led to meaningful changes in the long-standing challenges of refugee education. She finds that when and where real changes occurred, individuals or small groups of refugees and policymakers acted with tremendous agency and as tireless advocates.

What Is the What is the story of Valentino Achak Deng, a refugee in war-ravaged southern Sudan who flees from his village in the mid-1980s and becomes one of the so-called Lost Boys. Valentino’s travels bring him in contact with enemy soldiers, with liberation rebels, with hyenas and lions, with disease and starvation, and with deadly murahaleen (militias on horseback)–the same sort who currently terrorize Darfur. Eventually Deng is resettled in the United States with almost 4000 other young Sudanese men, and a very different struggle begins. Based closely on true experiences, What Is the What is heartbreaking and arresting, filled with adventure, suspense, tragedy, and, finally, triumph.

Document from the year 2017 in the subject Sociology - Individual, Groups, Society, , language: English, abstract: This study sought to investigate the economic and socio-cultural impact of refugees on the Kenyan communities. The data for this study was collected from primary and secondary sources. The research instruments were questionnaires and interview schedules. The study population comprised of 30 refugees, 10 camp officials and 20 locals. Purposive sampling was used to select 60 respondents. Data collected was analyzed using descriptive statistical analysis. Descriptive statistics such as frequency counts, means and percentages were used in analyzing data. Unlike many communities whereby refugees are restricted to the camp, the situation in Kakuma Camp is different. The Kakuma refugees move freely to any part of the Kakuma. There is a good social relation between the host community and the refugees in Kakuma. There have been intermarriages between the refugees and the host community. The hosts and the refugees also attend some social events like weddings, funerals and child naming ceremonies together. However, there are some minor negative developments as a result of the refugees’ presence for almost two decades in the Kakuma community. These negative impacts include poor sanitation, scarcity of land, security issues and moral degeneration. This notwithstanding, the positive impacts of the refugees’ presence on the host community outweighed the negatives. Indeed, the presence of the refugees on Kakuma has turned the place from a small village to an urbanized centre. The Kakuma community can boast of much better modern infrastructural development springing up all over the town after the refugees’ settlement. The study found the types of development that can be associated with the presence of the refugees to include the provision of banks, telecommunication and Internet cafés.

This book tracks the conceptual journeying of the term ‘transgender’ from the Global North—where it originated—along with the physical embodied journeying of transgender asylum seekers from countries within Africa to South Africa and considers the interrelationships between the two. The term 'transgender' transforms as it travels, taking on meaning in relation to bodies, national homes, institutional frameworks and imaginaries. This study centres on the experiences and narratives of people that can be usefully termed 'gender refugees', gathered through a series of life story interviews. It is the argument of this book that the departures, border crossings, arrivals and perceptions of South Africa for gender refugees have been both enabled and constrained by the contested meanings and politics of this emergence of transgender. This book explores, through these narratives, the radical constitutional-legal possibilities for 'transgender' in South Africa, the dissonances between the possibilities of constitutional law, and the pervasive politics/logic of binary ‘sex/gender’ within South African society. In doing so, this book enriches the emergent field of Transgender Studies and challenges some of the current dominant theoretical and political perceptions of 'transgender'. It offers complex narratives from the African continent regarding sex, gender, sexuality and notions of home concerning particular geo-politically situated bodies.

This edited volume approaches waiting both as a social phenomenon that proliferates in irregularised forms of migration and as an analytical perspective on migration processes and practices. Waiting as an analytical perspective offers new insights into the complex and shifting nature of processes of bordering, belonging, state power, exclusion and inclusion, and social relations in irregular migration. The chapters in this book address legal, bureaucratic, ethical, gendered, and affective dimensions of time and migration. A key concern is to develop more theoretically robust approaches to waiting in migration as constituted in and through multiple and relational temporalities. The chapters highlight how waiting is configured in specific legal, material, and socio-cultural situations, as well as how migrants encounter, incorporate, and resist temporal structures. This collection includes ethnographic and other empirically based material, as well as theorizing that cross-cut disciplinary boundaries. It will be relevant to scholars from anthropology and sociology, and others interested in temporalities, migration, borders, and power. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.tandfebooks.com , has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.