There are over 3 million refugees across Africa who have fled their homes due to violent conflict and persecution. UNHCR, the UN refugee agency mandated to protect refugees, serves approximately 41% of these people,[1] mainly those living in refugee camps.

Although refugees are often required to live in camps, sometimes they are attacked and killed in these ostensible safe havens. In recent years there have been refugee massacres in Burundi,[2] in northern Uganda,[3] in Rwanda,[4] and raids on camps in Guinea Conakry in 2000 and 2001, among other examples. A leading authority on refugees writes, “It is very well-known that congregating refugees in camps can actually create insecurity.”[5]

Especially for some groups of refugees, such as certain ethnic minorities, mixed ethnic marriages, orphans and single women, the camps are fraught with unmanageable perils. Some refugees live in danger in the camps, while many others flee and are forced to risk living in urban setting where they are at further risk.

Developing countries with debilitated, dysfunctional, or non-existent government structures and social systems are often unable to shoulder the burden of poverty of their own nationals, let alone the needs of these urban refugees. Refugees are often pushed to the most extreme and desperate margins.

According to Human Rights Watch, Nairobi’s refugees live “unseen and forgotten”[6] by governments and the UN and are “frequently subjected to the abuse of their most basic rights.”[7] Among Nairobi’s estimated 150,000 refugees and asylum seekers,[8] many live in slum settings or on the impoverished periphery of Nairobi. The UN’s self-initiated investigation in 2001 in Kenya found a systematic failure to protect refugees in these locations.

In 2006, Mapendo, in collaboration with UNHCR and other agencies, conducted an urban refugee participatory needs assessment. The findings include lack of access to healthcare and consequent deaths, sexual and gender-based violence against girls and women, child abduction and early, forced marriage, significant levels of isolation among refugees, difficulty in meeting basic needs, and high risk of HIV infection among refugee girls and women who resort to commercial sex work in an effort to survive.[9]

Why do so many urban refugees in Kenya live in peril and squalor, without the attention of the NGO community? The Kenyan government’s encampment policy requires refugees to reside in camps. As a Kenyan government partner and the lead agency in charge of refugee care and protection, the UNHCR focuses its assistance in the camps. The majority of funding for refugee assistance flows from the UNHCR to larger non-governmental organizations in the refugee camps. Urban refugees live among locals and are not obviously visible to the international community.[10] Over the past decades, there has never been a systematic effort to identify and assist urban refugees. Their plight has gone unnoticed and unaddressed both in Kenya and in other African countries. (Burundi, Uganda, South Africa as well as others).

Mapendo’s independent funding makes the agency flexible and able to quickly address unmet, immediate and emerging needs. With over twenty years of combined experience working with refugees, Mapendo’s co-founders have witnessed the trauma that unassisted refugees face, as well as their struggle to eke out a living in urban centers where they have no means of dignified survival.

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