What are refugee camps good for?
The plight of refugees in sub-Saharan Africa

Are refugee camps good for refugees? Are refugee camps good for Africa? Is this strategy for dealing with refugees a successful one for them and their host nations, African countries in particular?

Research in sub-Saharan Africa shows that refugee camps are bad not only for refugees, but also for the African countries which host them. When refugee camps were first introduced in Africa in the 1960s, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) believed they could have positive outcomes for the continent. Modernisation theory – the understanding of development endorsed by the World Bank in the 1960s – argued that people developed more advanced skills when they had to settle in new, unfamiliar areas. Applied to Africa’s refugees, the theory suggested that refugee camps could be used to develop parts of rural Africa as the basis of new agricultural settlements which would eventually be integrated into the host society.

But modernisation theory has been discredited: far from ‘developing’ and ‘modernising’, people in refugee camps usually became poorer and remained dependent on food aid for survival. Yet instead of abandoning camps and seeking better alternatives, the UNHCR developed a new justification for them – that refugees are temporary and not candidates for permanent integration. Thus the current approach is simply to keep refugees alive until they can be repatriated.

Today, refugee camps are often prison-like places that no one wants to live in and those who can, escape. Conditions are particularly bad for children. They may be exposed to potentially fatal epidemics and are almost inevitably undernourished. As adults in camps are generally denied the opportunity to work, children cannot learn the skills they would normally gain through working with their parents in agriculture and handicrafts. Although primary schools are often provided in camps, many children do not attend them as they are required to help with family chores.

Refugee camps are also bad for the African countries that host them. Camps are expensive and often wasteful of valuable international aid. Yet when refugees are forced to repatriate, camp infrastructure, including schools and hospitals, is usually destroyed. Camps also tend to undermine existing local welfare services by paying higher wages and luring the most qualified staff.

There are successful alternative approaches for Africa and its refugees. An example is Guinea’s policy towards refugees from Liberia and Sierra Leone, who were allowed to settle in local villages and were given access to existing local welfare services, which were reinforced as part of international relief programmes. This approach was beneficial for the local and refugee populations and cost a fraction of camps – an estimated US$4 per refugee per year compared with US$50 for camp-based medical programmes.

Based on this research, policy recommendations include:

• Refugees should be allowed to settle amongst the local population, seek work to support their families, and therefore contribute to the local economy. A good example of this approach is the Ivory Coast.
• African governments should work with the UNHCR and international donors to explore ways in which international aid for refugees can be detached from the camp model.
• Refugee relief programmes should work through and be used to strengthen existing local welfare facilities, rather than by-passing and undermining them.

Barbara Harrell-Bond
Forced Migration and Refugee Studies
American University in Cairo
PO Box 2511
113 Sharia Kasr El Aini
Cairo
Egypt

T +2 02 794-2219

behbond@aucegypt.edu

Report summarised by:
Sally Gainsbury
Institute of Development Studies
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9RE
UK

T +44 (0)1273 877305

s.gainsbury@ids.ac.uk

See also
‘Are refugee camps good for children?’ in New Issues in Refugee Research, Working Paper No. 29, UNHCR, by Barbara Harrell-Bond, August 2000
www.jha.ac/articles/u029.htm

Views expressed on these pages are not necessarily those of DFID, IDS, id21 or other contributing institutions. Copyright remains with the original authors but (unless stated otherwise) articles may be copied or quoted without restriction, provided id21 and originating author(s) and institution(s) are acknowledged. Copyright © 2005 id21. All rights reserved.