As a child, life in the Dadaab refugee camp is full of hardship and difficulties. In the largest refugee settlements in the world, education is a luxury denied most of the children who live there.
Thousands of children have travelled from Kenya, Ethiopia and Somalia to the refugee camps of Dabaab. The Dadaab camps Dagahaley, Hagadera and Ifo were constructed in 1992. The more recent Ifo II and Kambioos camps were opened in 2011 after 130,000 new refugees, who fled Somalia due to severe drought, arrived. The children have travelled long distances on foot to escape violent conflict, famine and thirst. The journey is long and hard, and many children have lost family members too weak to survive along the way. There are now around 156,000 Children of school going age living in the Dadaab refugee camps. Only one third of those children are receiving any kind of education. Many of the children, especially those from Somalia, have never experienced formal education; they have never seen a school and do not know what a teacher is.
Set up at the outset of Somalia’s civil war in 1991 to accommodate 90,000 refugees, three camps near the northeastern Kenyan town of Dadaab – Hagadera, Ifo and Dagahaley – are now home to more than three times that number, and persistent conflict in Somalia, from where 95 percent of the refugees originate, means the population grows daily.
Now that the camp is set to close down after a directive from the Kenyan government, the future of this children is uncertain. The few we spoke to didn’t want to leave as the camp is the only place they have known as home. Majority fear their hope for education might die once they are out of the camps. Their social life has to change as everyone they know, they have grown up with.
CCTV’s Kathryn Ogunde with one of the students in Dadab’s IFO 2 Camp
