By Katrina Manson in Dadaab
A man grieves after the burial of his 12-month-old daughter at the UN refugee camp outside Dadaab, Kenya, near the Somali border. She died of malnutrition 25 days after reaching the camp
Like all ambitious entrepreneurs, Kunow Bashir, 26, has a dream. After saving $2,150 to open a small pharmacy, stocked with painkillers, vitamins and the odd antibiotic, he hopes one day to have a "huge business" and health clinic. Six months after he set up shop, he thinks he has already broken even.
Mr Bashir, a "senior" Somali refugee, has spent his last 20 years in Dadaab, the world's largest refugee camp, in eastern Kenya.
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Hundreds of thousands of Somalis live in what is effectively a large town, made up of three main sites, which between them contain 19 primary schools, six secondary schools, three hospitals and three libraries. Its economy is significant, and the camp services are far more sophisticated than those in nearby Dadaab town, a fact that has not escaped residents there.
The camp's origins lie in the Somalian civil war of 1991, when Somalis first fled to neighbouring Kenya. Twenty years later, the $100m-a-year camp houses and feeds two new generations, including 8,000 grandchildren of the 1991 arrivals. Drought, famine and political strife have sent 116,000 more refugees to the area this year. They have settled on the outskirts of the camp, bringing the number of Somalis in and around the camp to more than 400,000. The new arrivals have stoked long-running hostility from locals, not least because the district is facing its own drought.
"Of course there is a backlash against them," says UN refugee agency spokesman William Spindler. "There is growing discomfort among the local population, and lots of problems over land."
Officially, the camps' residents – nearly all Somali – are allowed only piecemeal "incentive wages" for their work as interpreters, teachers and builders for humanitarian agencies. Unofficially, despite not being allowed work permits or to leave the camp, their economy dwarfs local Kenyan businesses. Some even pay an annual shop tax.
The value of trade throughout the camps is worth $25m a year drawn from 5,301 shops, according to one study, commissioned by Kenya's department of refugee affairs. This compares with $1.3m and 370 shops in host town Dadaab.
Some question whether long-term refugees who have established successful businesses such as Mr Bashir should instead be seen as economic migrants. "Maybe we should assess Dadaab [refugee camp] in terms of the regional economy," says Paul Crook, head of the UN labour agency in Kenya.
Mobile phone stores, internet cafes, hotels, grocers and butchers thrive in the camp. Many locals resent the refugees' regular free food rations, their mud-brick homes that are nicer than local huts, superior medical facilities, electricity supply and their long-term depletion of firewood, grazing land and water.
"Those who flee Somalia have been fed and the local community has been left out even when we are suffering from our own drought," says Issa Mohamed, who heads a Dadaab community organisation. "They have not only occupied the land but they have also taken over the resources." The situation for local people is so bad that the UN's food agency already supplies more than 50,000 of them with food.
Some argue that the arrival of wealthy international aid organisations has provided jobs and helped push wages higher. The UNHCR has also increased support for locals, providing electricity, installing boreholes and building schools.
The tension between the two communities – as well as state concern about insecurity – has reached such a level that plans to build a new camp were put on hold earlier this year. This has left the thousands of recent arrivals with little support.
For the newly arrived Somalis who have settled on the outskirts of the camp, life is tough. A crowd of new arrivals dig a grave for a four year-old, next to a week-old grave for his baby sister. Their wide-eyed father, bone thin and prostrate, stares vacantly ahead. Three dead goats line a path among improvised huts. Maggots devour the tail of a disintegrating cow.
Doctors Without Borders, a medical charity in charge of a camp hospital, has called for the "immediate relocation" of the new arrivals. More people continue to arrive and the UN says 180,000 people will be relocated within four months.
Even their better-off compatriots, unable to leave the camp to build their fortunes elsewhere, have no alternative. Jamal Abdirahman, 23, reached the camp in 1991 after his father was killed, tried to return once but was forced back. He now works in "Jamal Mobile City", an ambitious name for a repair shack created from the spaces in between aid tarpaulin, wood boards and metal sheeting. "Here there's no life," he says. "A man must move."
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