NAIROBI (AFP)--Three U.N. agencies on Wednesday asked Kenya to allocate more land to house the growing number of Somali refugees fleeing conflict in their country. The U.N. refugee agency, the World Food Program and the U.N.'s Children Fund said more than 56,000 refugee have arrived in Kenya's northeastern Dadaab camps this year, raising its population to 224,000.
In a joint statement, the three agencies said living conditions would soon become intolerable in Dadaab's three camps, which are crammed with nearly three times the number of people they were designed for. "We may soon face a humanitarian crisis if we continue depending on the three existing camps to accommodate the new arrivals," UNHCR representative Liz Ahua said. "We need to extend the facilities at the camps, where for instance food distribution points were only designed to serve 90,000 people so are now extremely crowded because of new arrivals," said WFP Kenya country director Burkard Oberle. "And we need a new camp."
The agencies stressed that overcrowding caused inadequate sanitary conditions and an unsafe environment for women and children. The UNHCR warned that if the security and humanitarian situation didn't improve in Somalia, between 60,000 and 100,000 more refugees could cross the border to the Dadaab camps in 2009.
Source : Dowjones News Plus
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