Refugee Camps and Host Country Impacts

Refugee camps emerged as UNHCR's and host governments' default response to large, sudden refugee influxes, offering a way to concentrate humanitarian aid, registration, and security in a single administered location, but at the cost of restricting refugees' freedom of movement and economic self-sufficiency, often for years or decades. Kenya's Dadaab complex, established in 1991 and 1992 near the Somali border in response to the collapse of Siad Barre's government and the ensuing Somali civil war, grew into one of the largest refugee camp complexes in the world, at its peak housing more than 400,000 people across its Dagahaley, Hagadera, and Ifo sub-camps; more than three decades later, a significant share of its population consists of people born in the camp who have never set foot in Somalia. Kenya's neighboring Kakuma camp, opened in 1992 initially for South Sudan's "Lost Boys," and its adjoining Kalobeyei settlement, launched in 2016 with an explicit self-reliance model integrating refugees into the local economy, illustrate a broader shift in humanitarian policy away from pure encampment toward models that permit greater refugee mobility and livelihoods.