DADAAB CRISIS

Dadaab, the world’s biggest refugee camp, is home to a staggering 290,000 refugees, most of whom are from neighbouring Somalia. Up to 7,000 new refugees arrive in the camp every month. They use terms like "hell on earth" to describe the situation in their war-torn homeland. With rebel groups and government forces fighting on the streets of Mogadishu, a worsening drought and a food shortage verging on famine, Somalia now produces more refugees than any other country on earth.

Dadaab was designed to hold approximately 90,000 people – less than a third of its current population. Dangerously overcrowded and chronically underfunded, this camp is rapidly becoming a humanitarian crisis in itself.

UNHCR is providing shelter and emergency survival items for the hundreds of thousands of refugees in Dadaab. Our Emergency Response Team is stationed at key Somali border crossings when refugee flows are high, enabling rapid registration and transfer of refugees to Dadaab.

After a prolonged drought, several parts of Kenya are experiencing torrential rains, and UNHCR fears the camp is likely to be heavily flooded in the coming weeks, posing considerable health risks to the refugees in such a crowded setting. UNHCR is providing mosquito nets to protect them from malaria, and cholera kits to prevent and contain any outbreak of the deadly disease among this vulnerable refugee population.

Your donation can help provide urgent relief for a refugee family in crisis.

The world’s media tends to focus more on the problems in Somalia itself than on the camp in which so many Somali refugees have sought shelter. But now that the camp is becoming a humanitarian crisis in its own right, UNHCR is seeking to raise awareness in the international community. Below are some recent articles which highlight present concerns.

Conflict and drought force more Somalis to flee to Kenya UNHCR Briefing Notes, 25 Sept 2009

Somali refugees pour into Kenya by the thousands Reuters, 4 Jun 2009

Blind Somali refugee treks 90 km to safety Reuters, 6 Jun 2009