URBAN REFUGEES

Urban Refugees



Urban refugees

Urgan refugee is a term for a person who migrates to the countryside to escape city life. They are an influential demographic in rural areas that surround major cities. They can have a transforming impact on the industry of an area, shifting it away from agriculture towards tourism and the provision of the goods and services that tourists and urban refugees consume. They also impact land use, promoting the subdivision of broadacre agriculture into smaller hobby farms and residential lots; and, as a result of this, they are a major driver of house prices in these areas. This can sometimes create a boom and bust cycle, as an intake of urgan refugees may result in a dramatic increase in infrastructure such as housing, roads and power lines, which detracts from the rural aesthetic that attracted the urban refugees in the first place, thus leading to rejection of the locality by the next wave of refugees.

The traditional image of life in tented, sprawling camps no longer tells the full refugee story. As the world urbanizes, refugees too are increasingly moving to built up areas. Today, almost half of the world's 10.5 million refugees reside in urban areas, with only one-third in camps. Refugees move to the city in the hope of finding a sense of community, safety and economic independence; however, in reality, what many actually find is harassment, physical assault and poverty. It is in this context that the Humanitarian Policy Group, the International Rescue Committee (IRC) and the Refugee Consortium of Kenya undertook an exploratory review to develop a clearer understanding of the profiles and challenges of urban refugees living in Nairobi, Kenya.

In Kenya, a country that today is home to more than 370,000 refugees, there has been significant attention to the plight of refugees living in overcrowded camps. Yet there has been little focus on the growing number of refugees living in its urban centres. Indeed, the exact size of the refugee population in the capital city Nairobi is not known, with figures ranging from 45,000 to 100,000. Despite these high numbers, both quantitative and qualitative information available on these populations is scarce. In Nairobi urban refugees are dispersed over the city, often highly mobile and reluctant to come forward for support due to fear that they could be deported or sent to refugee camps. This makes them a largely 'invisible' population, despite their significant need for protection and other support mechanisms. Yet the findings of this study also indicate that refugees make an important contribution to the local and national Kenyan economy. This could be further harnessed to great effect if there were greater initiatives to support refugee livelihoods.

International and domestic refugee law has scrutinized the issue of what amounts to a gender-related severe deprivation of fundamental rights. While not all refugee law examples of such severe deprivation may be applicable within the crimes against humanity context, they do help to illustrate that gendered violations are wide-ranging, and are not restricted to ...