Category Archives: Refugees

The Refugee Voice

Posted on February 4, 2009 by | 1 Comment

Here’s three reasons why the debate about the Refugee Run is important; the event is making claims about the refugee experience, it’s doing it at the behest of the UNHCR and it’s targeting the rich and powerful. What’s wrong with any of those three items? Nothing at all, if you subscribe to the standard narrative about refugee management. The problem is that this is a mediated version of the refugee experience – an attempt to tug on the heart strings, and in this case the purse strings, of the participants.

The unfiltered refugee voice is hard to find. There are a host of organisations – not just UNHCR, but many many NGOs – that seek to present the refugee voice to the non-refugee, but that voice is being used to further the agendas of those organisations. That agenda may or may not be closely tied to the agenda of the refugees themselves – but how are you to know, when all you have is the filtered, mediated version of that voice? If you want to hear a more direct version, then the Kakuma Refugee Newsletter shows the way forward.

The Kakuma News Reflector is an independent news magazine produced by Ethiopian, Congolese, Ugandan, Rwandan, Somali, Sudanese and Kenyan journalists operating in Kakuma Refugee Camp, Kenya

A print version of the online news magazine is circulated in Kakuma camp and town. We will publish on a monthly basis until funding allows us to increase our publications to twice a month.

This is the best news from the humanitarian sector I’ve heard for a very long time, and something I’d hoped to see since I started working on information management and can strongly support. The project is made possible by a Fulbright Research Grant from the US Institute of International Education, and their email address is via Cornell University, so it’s not entirely unfiltered – but it’s good enough.

I found out about this via the Humanitarian Futures Programme, who heard it in turn from Linda Polman (author of the book We Did Nothing). The HFP blog reports that

The blog and newspaper has been causing some serious kinds of hair pulling within the UNHCR and is an absolutely fantastic example of citizen journalism, empowered by the web, completely changing the game of humanitarian business.

Why is it causing serious kinds of hair pulling? It should be clear from headlines such as UNHCR Processing Delays Refugee’s Study Abroad and questions like “Why does UNHCR maintain an incentive policy that does not provide refugees with equal pay for equal work?”

First, it’s accountability in practice, a direct threat to business as usual for aid organisations. Second, it’s unmediated – exactly the sort of refugee voice that UNHCR won’t present at Davos. Third, it demonstrates how information empowers people – something that we’ve been talking about for ages but failed to put into practice. Extending information rights to beneficiaries – in this case, the residents of Kakuma Refugee Camp – is no longer optional, and this are just the beginnings of the next stage of growth for the aid industry.

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Posted in Human Rights, Refugees, United Nations

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From out of the mouths of refugees

Posted on February 4, 2009 by | 4 Comments

When a refugee speaks in the camp and there’s nobody around to hear him, does he make a sound? It all starts in Davos, where UNHCR decided to mount a Refugee Run [PDF] offering to the assorted bigwigs

an experience unlike any other on the agenda: an opportunity to step into the world of conflict and experience life as a refugee.

It’s no big secret – times are tough in UN-land right now thanks to the financial crisis, and those bigwigs have got some mighty big pockets to go with their big wigs. Unfortunately the invitation was sent to William Easterley, scourge of the aid industry1, who posted it on his new (and recommended) blog, adding:

Did the words “insensitive,” “dehumanizing,” or “disrespectful” (not to mention “ludicrous”) ever come up in discussing the plans for “Refugee Run”? I hope such bad taste does not reflect some inability in UNHCR to see refugees as real people with their own dignity and rights.

I wouldn’t like to say whether it reflects such an inability in UNHCR cough cough. However UNHCR clearly thought it might reflect badly on UNHCR in some way, because they made sure that in their press release there was an Actual Refugee on hand to give it the stamp of approval:

The exhibit received a seal of approval from a genuine refugee, Raphael Mwandu from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. “The things you see in this simulation are the same as those in the camps,” he said, adding that it would help let people “know what is going on in our world so that they can meet together and find solutions.

The Refugee Run has its defenders, though, and they’re more convincing than the original invitation. In the comments on Easterley’s blog, one of Raphael’s friends explained that

As a friend and colleague of Raphael Mwandu, I can tell you that he works for the (non-UN) Hong Kong organisation that presented the event, and has helped run the Refugee Run for many hundreds of people over the past few years. He was not invited by the UNHCR but came as part of the staff from Hong Kong.

Now that’s fair enough, and I don’t wish to denigrate Raphael’s experiences, or the organisation that has set up the Refugee Run – but wouldn’t it be more accurate to describe him in the press release as one of the organisers of the event, rather than a “genuine refugee”? It’s the equivalent of having a quote saying “Virgin Airlines is the best airline I’ve ever been on” from a Mr R. Branson – it might be true, but it’s not honest.

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Posted in Refugees, United Nations

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At least Google Earth is good for fundraising

Posted on April 10, 2008 by | 2 Comments

So UNHCR releases a Google Earth layer to great fanfare:

Unveiling a new UNHCR layer in Google Earth before invited guests at UNHCR’s Geneva headquarters, Deputy High Commissioner for Refugees L. Craig Johnstone hailed the project as means to educate people worldwide on the plight of refugees and on the humanitarians who help them.

“Google Earth is a very powerful way for UNHCR to show the vital work that it is doing in some of the world’s most remote and difficult displacement situations,” said Johnstone. “By showing our work in its geographical context, we can really highlight the challenges we face on the ground and how we tackle them.”

I download the UNHCR KML file, fire up my creaky old version of Google Earth and have a look. The first thing I notice is that every time I click on a link for more information, it tells me how much it costs to buy school or farm equipment, and gives me a link to UNHCR fundraising so I can cough up right there.

So Google Earth – one of the most powerful yet accessible technology tools ever created, at the vanguard of a geospatial data revolution – is reduced to lining the pockets of UNHCR – an agency, incidentally, that recently came bottom of Ranking of Donor Agencies on Best Practices in Aid (Where Does The Money Go? [pdf], Easterly and Putze 2008). I don’t think that this is the best way to reach out to the public if you’re serious about educating them about refugee issues.

Now that I’ve got that rage off my chest, what’s positive about the UNHCR Google Earth layer? Well, it’s a start, and there are some interesting features; if you click on the layer for accessibility, it presents you with a visualisation of the catchment areas of water points in a refugee camp.

This is useful because it starts to give people an idea of one of the key issues for refugee management and the complexity of running a refugee camp. However it doesn’t really go much further than that – there’s no explanation of why those catchment areas are important, or how this information could be used. I’d also be surprised to hear that UNHCR staff working in the field are using this sort of tool to plan camp construction and management, but I’d love to hear from any UNHCR staff if I’m wrong… but that’s exactly the sort of thing we should be doing.

It does give a sense of the global span of refugee issues, and by focusing on three different locations it does present a range of different environments. However it’s still peddling the message that refugees are fundamentally people who need help, and that international organisations are the only ones that can help them. There’s nothing (that I saw) about the primary responsibility of governments to address the needs of refugees, or about the fact the primary source of support for most refugees is the refugees themselves.

If you’re interested in finding out how great UNHCR is, it’s a fantastic resource. If you’re interested in getting a deeper understanding of refugee issues, you probably want to look somewhere else. I realise that I’m starting to sound really bitter in these sorts of posts, but please understand – that’s because I think we should be doing better. Much, much better.

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Posted in GIS, Humanitarian, Refugees, Remote Sensing, United Nations, Web