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.