(ERGO) – Around 2,200 Somali refugee families living in Kenya’s Dadaab refugee camps have been becoming desperate for food due to a lapse in the issuance of registration cards and their inability to access food aid.
Habibo Abdiasis Shawi, a refugee mother of eight, living with her husband in Hagadera camp, said: “We are just relying on help from other Somali people here and that’s how I’m feeding my children. If we don’t get anything we just sleep, there is nowhere we can go.”
With her aid card she used to access 112 kilograms of food including maize, rice and sorghum. However, her aid card lapsed at the beginning of the year when families were informed that they needed to register afresh again with the aid organisations.
Habibo told Radio Ergo she visited the registration centre multiple times but had to return home empty handed as the queues were so long. The registration then closed temporarily, for reasons not explained by Kenya’s Refugee Affairs Secretariat (RAS) that is tasked with the registration of the refugees. It is understood that the process is set to resume again soon.
Meanwhile, families ae worried about how long they can wait without knowing how and where they will get food and their other basics.
“I am restless, I can’t even get loans because I don’t have a card [as a guarantee], so we are at home with nothing,” she said. “I can’t tell if we will get the aid next month or not, those are the challenges we face in the refugee camps. We don’t know where else to go.”
Her husband has been jobless since injuring his back two years ago and prices have also been soaring due to the economic downturn. They came to Kenya after fleeing from Jilib in Middle Juba, where their 1.5 hectares of farmland had shrivelled up due to successive failed rainy seasons and drought.
Also struggling is Daynabo Abdinoor Abdi, 75, who relied on the rations of four litres of cooking oil and 38 kilograms of food including rice, maize and sorghum that lasted her for a month. She and her three grandchildren live with their relatives in a makeshift shack as she doesn’t have her own house.
“Life was good before when we were getting maize and rice but now we don’t have any of that,” she said, describing it as the toughest period they have experienced since coming to Dadaab in August 2022.
“We are living in hardship and difficulties now and although I have not been asked to leave, I know I’m a burden to those I live with as no one likes to host people who are begging,” she said.
She also has to walk two kilometers to access water. Although the water is free, they have to carry full jerry cans home on their back.
Daynabo was displaced from Harawe village, Middle Juba in 2022, where her farm was flooded during excessive rain and flooding.
According to the Hagadera camp leader, Khalif Dhubow Jelle, the registration process will provide permanent cards to the families who joined the camps within the past three years. Their cards that recently expired had only been issued on a temporary basis.
Last year 180,000 families in Dadaab complex’s Ifo and Dhagahley camps were re-registered, and the process in Hagadera camp was due for completion within the first quarter of this year.
Khalif said if the registration process continued to delay it would affect the families as most had no source of income.
“We have met with the aid organisations and we have told them that the people are in a critical situation, because I have seen people with my own eyes who are already desperate,” he said.
