Borderless Higher Education for Refugees

Lessons from the Dadaab Refugee Camps

Wenona Giles, Lorrie Miller, Wenona Giles, Lorrie Miller

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350151260
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Comparative Education

Winner of the 2022 CIES Jackie Kirk Outstanding Book Award Higher education is increasingly recognized as crucial for the livelihoods of refugees and displaced populations caught in emergencies and protracted crises, to enable them to engage in contemporary, knowledge-based, global society. This book tells the story of the Borderless Higher Education for Refugees (BHER) project which delivers tuition-free university degree programs into two of the largest protracted refugee camps in the world, Dadaab and Kakuma in Kenya. Combining a human rights approaches, critical humanitarianism and a concern with gender relations and intersecting inequalities, the book proposes that higher education can provide refugees with the possibility of staying put or returning home with dignity. Written by academics based in Canada, Kenya, Somalia and the USA, as well as NGO workers and students from the camps, the book demonstrates how North-South and South-South collaborations are possible and indeed productive.

Part One

Putting a Project into Action

1

Historical and Political Contestations in the Dadaab Refugee Camps and North-Eastern Kenya

Mohamed Duale, Esther Munene and Marangu Njogu

The contextual complexities and underlying humanitarian needs that gave rise to the Borderless Higher Education for Refugees (BHER) project are explored in this opening chapter. We present a history of the region and explore the nature of the relationship between host and refugee communities who live in or near Dadaab, a protracted refugee situation in north-eastern Kenya. We document what we have learned about the local context through our teaching, administrative work and research, and why we think the Dadaab camps are more than spaces of containment. It is our view that it matters how we think about refugee camps, and that this is particularly important for those who are interested in doing long-term educational work. If refugee camps are only places to warehouse refugees or sites of temporary containment for displaced people, then all of our work and efforts towards providing refugees with access to higher education cannot be considered a priority.

In order to understand what it is that can be done with, as well as for refugees and local host communities dwelling in and near the Dadaab camps, we begin by first setting out to understand the relationship between locals and refugees within the larger social, political and historical dynamics of these camps in Kenya’s north-east. Over time, the proximity of refugees and locals, who are both largely ethnic Somalis, has enabled the establishment of amicable, though sometimes tense, host-refugee relations. In addition, we explore how the camps, as border spaces, are contested terrain in larger struggles over belonging, economic resources and the regional role of the Kenyan state. In the second part of this chapter, we describe how the camps attract refugees for their relative safety, prospects for resettlement and the availability of social supports such as education, which are often unobtainable in their war-torn countries. However, there are two sides to this story, as the camps are both enabling and disempowering. They are ever changing social and political spaces that simultaneously offer refugees and locals new and hopeful beginnings, as well as precarious lives.

We would be remiss if we did not talk about our positionality within this discussion of the relationship between host and refugee communities in Kenya. This chapter was co-authored by two Kenyans, Esther Munene and Marangu Njogu, and a Somali Canadian, Mohamed Duale. We have many years of experience working or teaching in the camps and occupy different subject positions. Njogu came to work in the camps in the early 1990s as a humanitarian relief worker with CARE Kenya before joining Windle International Kenya (WIK) as its Kenya director. He is considered to have played an instrumental role in the establishment of the education system in Kenya’s refugee camps. Munene came to teach in the Dadaab camps over seven years ago and has remained as field staff with WIK and the BHER project. She works closely with students to promote their success. Before coming to Dadaab, she expected to find a fenced camp with manned entry and exit points. There was a sense of fear fuelled by the stories in the media, family and friends about the Dadaab refugee camps. However, she quickly came to realize that this was not the case, and that refugees could move within and out of the camps, provided they received clearance from the Kenyan authorities. Duale also had similar initial concerns about going to an insecure space, but like Munene, has grown to appreciate the unique ways people in Dadaab have survived the hardships of protracted displacement. He fled Somalia as a child in the early 1990s and lived as a refugee in Kenya with experiences not unlike some of those in Dadaab.

As a result, co-writing about the camps as Kenyan, Somali and Canadian was sometimes challenging given our diverse personal experiences, different philosophical perspectives, varying professional commitments and the fact that we live and work in different parts of the world. We focus here on what the camps mean, not only to the people with whom we spoke (we conducted focus groups with ten refugee and host community members in Dadaab), but also to us as researchers and practitioners, who are neither locals nor refugees. Together, we feel a heightened sense of ethical responsibility to produce a nuanced work that attends to the social and political complexity of the Dadaab camps.

Contested Terrains

Through an exploration of the interplay between social and political conditions in the camps, this section discusses how a discourse about the Dadaab refugee camps as a ‘security risk’ is about more than actual dangers. It is also about who owns and who is entitled to benefit from economic resources in politically uncertain times in Kenya. The Dadaab refugee camps are borderlands where refugees and citizens live in close contact and are indistinguishable in terms of livelihood needs and, sometimes, nationality.

As the site of the Shifta War¹ of the 1960s, the region was militarized before the arrival of refugees, and its inhabitants were seen as disloyal and a threat to national security. As a result, local communities in the north-east have long held grievances about being marginalized by the Kenyan state. The establishment of refugee camps in the Dadaab sub-county added to these grievances as locals in Dadaab believed that the international community was doubly marginalizing them. For a long time, the local community was not part of the mandate of the humanitarian organizations that provide aid to refugee communities. Locals felt that the refugees led better lives than they did, with access to hospitals, schools, potable water and social services, and this occasionally created tensions with the aid agencies and refugees. Over time, a certain degree of personal integration occurred through close interaction.

Nonetheless, the prospect of large-scale refugee integration is opposed by the local community for several reasons. On the environmental front, locals fear the supposed impact of refugees on ecologically sensitive grazing land (see chapter by Alsop and Cohen). In addition, they are concerned about Somali clan demographics, which threaten local political power and finite financial resources. Furthermore, these local anxieties intersect with wider national concerns over security, including the suspected infiltration of the Al-Shabab terrorist group into the refugee camps. Economically, Kenyan elites are apprehensive about the Somali business community, which they accuse of benefiting from piracy, illicit imports and undercutting ‘Kenyan’ traders.

Securitization of the North-East and Al-Shabab

Known as the Northern Frontier District (NFD) during Kenya’s colonial era, the north-eastern region of Kenya is ethnically Somali and was partitioned from other Somali territories, now part of Somalia, Ethiopia and Djibouti, and co-governed with Kenya as part of British East Africa. It was classified as a closed district by the colonial government and locals were later required to carry a permit to travel in and out of the district. On the eve of independence, Somalis in the NFD voted to join Somalia in an informal referendum, which was later discarded by the British colonial administration (Hyndman 1997, p. 15). After Kenya became independent in 1963, the Shifta War resulted in a declaration of a state of emergency that began in December of that year and continued until 1991. During this era, there were many human rights violations by the central government of Kenya (ibid.). The Shifta War thus cemented the status of the north-east, formerly the NFD, as part of the political periphery of Kenya. The region continues to be synonymous with insecurity, especially in recent years as a result of Kenya’s intervention and war against the Al-Shabab terrorist group originating in neighbouring Somalia. At the same time, Kenya’s north-east hosts the Dadaab refugee camps, one of the world’s largest and most storied sites of protracted displacement. The camps are considered a security risk by the government.

Somali Kenyans may be part of the state, but they are not necessarily considered part of the Kenyan nation. An ethno-political geography of ‘up Kenya’ (the north-east) and ‘down Kenya’ (the rest of the country) is reinforced by racialized categories, which distinguish Somalis, who are called warya (or ‘boy’ in Somali) from non-Somali Africans, who the Somalis call nywele ngumu (or people with ‘hard hair’). These racialized terms have their origin in European colonial rule in Africa, which categorized and governed the native population according to perceived racialized differences (Mamdani 2012, p. 74, 109, 115, 117, 123). Non-Somali Africans in Kenya complain of discrimination in the north-east, just as Somalis protest racialized profiling by police in the rest of the country. These terms also highlight the ways in which the Somali north-east is considered a nominal rather than a substantive and cultural part of the Kenyan nation.

In addition, the protracted war between the Kenyan government and Al-Shabab in Somalia keeps a political spotlight on the region. In 2011, Kenya sent an army to purportedly shore up its defences but, in the process, established a semi-autonomous regional state in Somalia’s southern provinces. Kenya had not received consent from Somalia when it sent its army to intervene in their affairs, a move that continues to be a source of tension with the Somali Federal Government. The north-east has been reimagined as a front in Kenya’s ‘war on terror’ where efforts to establish a buffer against extremist militancy in Somalia are focused. Initially, before refugees settled in the Dadaab refugee camps, banditry was the main threat in the north-east region of Kenya, particularly in the form of secessionist activities during the years of the Shifta War and emergency rule. Banditry was also seen in the form of intercommunal conflict over access to scarce water and pastureland (Whittaker 2012, p. 391–408).

During the most recent decade, a new threat posed by Al-Shabab has added to the longstanding perception of the north-east as an insecure borderland. There have been numerous attacks on Kenyan police and on communication masts. Humanitarian NGOs are also attacked for spreading ‘Western’ education as well as for more opportunistic reasons, such as the acquisition of vehicles and other equipment. There have been raids of NGO compounds within the camps as well as the kidnapping of aid workers (Sweeney 2012, p. 1), although there has not yet been an attack in the town of Dadaab. As a result of these increasing attacks, the BHER project, which had previously housed their staff within the BHER Learning Centre, in 2015 decided to relocate them to the more secure Dadaab NGO Compound.

After Al-Shabab attacked Nairobi’s upscale Westgate Mall in 2013 (Blanchard 2013, p. 1) and Garissa University² in 2015, the Kenyan government identified the Dadaab camps as a sanctuary for the extremist group and demanded their closure (Allison 2015, p. 1). These terror attacks have hardened attitudes towards Somali refugees (New Humanitarian 2015, p. 1), though there is no evidence that refugees have been involved in the attacks. In 2013, Kenya concluded a tripartite agreement with the UNHCR and the Somali Federal Government to facilitate the camps’ closure (UNHCR 2015, p. 6). Kenya hoped to shore up security in the north-east, which it considers a porous borderland, by repatriating Somali refugees, an aspiration that has yet to fully materialize despite the drastic decline in the number of registered refugees in the Dadaab camps.

The defeat of, or negotiations with, Al-Shabab still seem a long way off, and the group has sought to exploit ethnic, religious and regional divisions between Kenyans, often killing non-Muslims from ‘down Kenya’ in order to tempt an overreaction by the Kenyan government and society-at-large. The Kenyan government’s responses to terror attacks have sometimes played into Al-Shabab’s hands, particularly during the wide-ranging crackdown on Somalis in 2014 when police detained thousands of Somali refugees in Kasarani Stadium in Nairobi, called a ‘concentration camp’ by Somalis and drawing the ire of international human rights organizations (Sperber 2015, p. 1–2).

The establishment of the refugee camps in the predominantly Somali north-east was not an accident. Refugees were placed in a remote, economically marginalized and ethnically Somali part of the country that was already heavily surveilled. And as mentioned, the Dadaab camps are also the subject of multiple, sometimes contradictory, political contestations over local and national belonging, competition over resources and Kenya’s role within the region. When the refugee camps were opened in the early 1990s, Dadaab was a small, isolated and ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part One Putting a Project into Action
• 1 Historical and Political Contestations in the Dadaab Refugee Camps and North-Eastern Kenya
• 2 Gender Disparities in University Access in the Kenyan Kakuma Camps
• 3 The Challenges of Reciprocity and Relative Autonomy in North/South Partnerships
• 4 Development of a Community Health Education Degree Programme through a North-South Collaboration: Lessons Learned
• Part Two Students and Teachers: Inside the BHER Supported Classroom
• 5 Refugees Respond: Using Digital Tools, Networks and ‘Production Pedagogies’ to Envision Possible Futures
• 6 Technology and Flexibility: The Online Learning Experience of Teaching Assistants and their Students in the Dadaab Refugee Camps
• 7 Out of Bounds: The BHER Bones of Teaching Geography Across Borders
• 8 Academic Philanthropy and Pedagogies of Resilience
• 9 Refugee Students’ Experience of Accessing English Language Learning in Dadaab, Kenya
• 10 A Gallery to Rethink and (Re)place the Anthropocene: Framing From A Place-based Borderless Higher Education
• Afterword
• Notes
• References
• Index
• Copyright