When I came to work for Restless Development earlier this year, many people thought it was a bit of an odd career choice. I mean hadn’t I spent the past 5 years volunteering almost exclusively on refugee issues? Didn’t I have a degree in Refugee and Forced Migration Studies? Why the sudden shift from forced migration to international development, or more particularly youth-led development? Read more here.
When I came to work for Restless Development earlier this year, many people thought it was a bit of an odd career choice. I mean hadn’t I spent the past 5 years volunteering almost exclusively on refugee issues? Didn’t I have a degree in Refugee and Forced Migration Studies? Why the sudden shift from forced migration to international development, or more particularly youth-led development?
Well, I thought I’d use this platform to sketch out why in fact this is not a shift at all, and how for many young people in the world today the intersections between displacement and development become increasingly clear.
My line of thinking can traced back to 2009 when I had the opportunity to travel to Dadaab to conduct an educational inventory of the camps. As you may have seen in the news, the Dadaab refugee camp complex - located in Kenya near the Somali border - has been in existence for over two decades and is the largest camp in the world today. Given the protracted nature of the refugee crisis, many young people were born and raised Dadaab, having never know a life outside of the camp.
As such Dadaab offers a prime case study for what the academic literature refers to as the Relief v. Development paradox. The relief model stems from the premise that “the crisis will have a beginning, a middle, and an end”[2], and often excludes longer-term planning for things like education in favour of priorities such as: distribution and provisioning of material aid, constructing short-term shelters and providing support for post-traumatic stress.. This top-down approach to ‘care and maintenance’ is often critiqued for creating refugee dependency syndrome, for disempowering refugees, and for creating tensions between those who receive aid and those who don’t.
Conversely, the development model suggests “refugee emergencies can, also, be seen as opportunities for development” and that as refugee crises are rarely short-term, “it is imperative to begin long-term planning from day one”.[3] Some argue that using a development lens to respond to refugee crises helps ensure the participation and self-sufficiency of the beneficiaries and is “about giving people choices rather than inducing passivity and a feeling of helplessness”[4] However, development planning is more complex, taking into account short- and long-term planning for programming in education, skills development, income generation and public health awareness. Refugee experts like Kaiser and Crisp note how the “inherently political nature of refugee presence” makes the implementation of a developmental response incredibly difficult- particularly given the political divides within institutions who provide relief and development, such as tensions between UNHCR and UNDP, the US State Department’s Bureau for Refugee Programs and USAID.[5]
So where do young people come in?
It’s being increasingly recognized how the liminality of displacement can enable young refugees to challenge (and even reconfigure) dominant gender, ethnic, generational and political ideologies. In rising to new challenges, young refugees demonstrate that they are not simply victims of political turmoil, but ‘agents in overcoming diversity’ and ‘actors (re)shaping social relations and power formations’.[6] While much research on youth agency has focused on how growing autonomy and generational tensions have been manifested in adolescent violence,[7] a counter-discourse portrays young people ‘as peace resources’, highlighting how newfound agency can be a driving force behind social development.[8]
During my time in Dadaab, I was fortunate enough to witness this counter-discourse in action - young people taking up meaningful roles within their community to impact positive change. For many young people who were born in the camp and lived there all their lives, the relief model simply does not make sense. They want to see their peers receiving an education and gaining the skills they need to ‘bring about change, to bring about a new Somalia, a new governance, a new ideology’ - as one Somali youth put it. For this, a development approach is needed, or even better, a youth-led development approach.
The year I was in Dadaab, UNHCR announced that in order to provide every school aged young person with an education they would need to build 46 additional schools[9]. In 2009, there were 6 secondary schools. The year previously there had only been 3.
Why the sudden doubling of secondary education within one year? Well, in response to limited absorption capacity of secondary schools within the camp, the refugee community in Dadaab had demonstrated their agency by constructing the three additional schools on their own. Through a Memorandum of Understanding between UNHCR, Care and the community, the refugees accepted responsibility for paying for incentive teachers and school supplies, while Care provided support in the management and running of the schools and UNHCR assisted in liaising with donors. It was an amazing accomplishment, and one which the current education director credits largely to young people:
“The establishment of Community Secondary Schools was an initiative mainly by the refugee youth [as well as] the parents, community leaders and other stakeholders…The youth who had qualified [for resettlement to Canada] and others who had graduated from colleges and Universities in Kenya through scholarships given by Windle Trust Kenya among others, teamed up and volunteered to be teachers to the Community Secondary Schools…The youth (both school going and out of school) mobilized available resources to equip the first classes with desks among other [things].”
Somali youth who had been resettled to Canada have played a key role in supporting these schools through an association they formed called Students for Refugee Students (SRS) that provides essential funding for school supplies. When asked why they feel their contributions are so important, SRS members replied:
“The Somali youths are the ones who really experience what it is to be stateless, what it is to be born a refugee, grow up refugee, cross borders and all this […] we lost that childhood and everything, so we should now be proactive, defend and break this trend”
“We are the generation that has faced the biggest challenges, and we are the generation that understands these challenges. So it’s not just the material support that we do for the Somali community, but we have to play an advocacy role”
This youth-led association proves is an exemplar of how young people can overcome the challenges facing older generations, to work collectively towards their development objectives:
“What’s unique about this organization is that we are all students from refugee camps, and we have all different clan affiliations and tribes, and all of us are doing this to get rid of that inkling. To me that is one of the important things that we have going for us, to see that happening in a community…through education we can break that cycle of clan affiliations and do something for a bigger cause…I think education can bring that change and go to the next level.” “Just looking at Students for Refugee Students itself, it gives you a hint of how people are getting together and uniting, and bringing a change. In that sense you see that people are getting educated … If we all get together as brothers and sisters we can make the country go higher, and that is the biggest emphasis we are making.”
“What’s unique about this organization is that we are all students from refugee camps, and we have all different clan affiliations and tribes, and all of us are doing this to get rid of that inkling. To me that is one of the important things that we have going for us, to see that happening in a community…through education we can break that cycle of clan affiliations and do something for a bigger cause…I think education can bring that change and go to the next level.”
“Just looking at Students for Refugee Students itself, it gives you a hint of how people are getting together and uniting, and bringing a change. In that sense you see that people are getting educated … If we all get together as brothers and sisters we can make the country go higher, and that is the biggest emphasis we are making.”
So to sum up then, I must send a huge thanks to Students for Refugee Students to being my first introduction to youth-led development and inspiring my journey here at Restless Development.Their tireless efforts to make ameaningful development impact on the ground, is yet another shining example of how young people can be leaders- not tomorrow but today.
All quotations are taken from: R. PLASTERER, UNCHR New Issues in Refugee Research, Paper No. 22 “Transnational Philanthropy: Somali youth in Canada and Kenya, 2011
[1] This paragraph draws heavily from: L. WRIGHT and R. PLASTERER, Beyond Basic Education: Exploring Opportunities for Higher Learning in Kenyan Refugee Camps, Refuge Journal Vol 27, No 2 (2010).
[2] J. Mimica and P. Stubbs “Between Relief and Development: Theories, Practice and Evaluation of Psycho-social Projects in Croatia,” Community Development Journal 13 (1996): 283.
[3]Ibid
[4]Ibid
[5] KAISER, T. ‘Participating in Development? Refugee Protection, Politics, and Developmental Appraoches to Refugee Management in Uganda’ Third World Quarterly 26, no 2 (2005):351-67; CRISP, J., “Mind the Gap! UNHCR, Humanitarian Assistance and the Development Process,” International Migration Review 35, no 1 (2001): 169
[6] HAMPSHIRE, K., PORTER, G., KILPATRICK, K. KYEI, P. ADJALOO, M. and OPPONG, G. (2008) ‘Liminal spaces : changing inter-generational relations among long-term Liberian refugees in Ghana’, Human Organization, 67(1): p. 25-36.; ABBINK, J. (2005) ‘Being young in Africa: the politics of despair and renewal’, 1-36 in ABBINK, J. and VAN KESSEL, I. (eds.) Vanguard or Vandals: Youth, Politics and Conflict in Africa, Leiden, Boston, Brill.
[7] BAY, E. G. and DONHAM, D. L. (2006) States of violence: politics, youth, and memory in contemporary Africa, Charlottesville London University of Virginia Press. ABBINK, J. and VAN KESSEL, I. (eds.) (2005) Vanguard or Vandals: Youth, Politics and Conflict in Africa, Leiden, Boston, Brill.
[8] McEVOY-LEVY, S. (ed.) (2006) Trouble Makers or Peacemakers? Youth and Post-Accord Peace Building, Indiana University of Notre Dame Press; HELSING, J., KIRLIC, N., MCMASTER, N. and SONNENSCHEIN., N. (2006) ‘Young Peoples’ Activism in Bosnia, Northern Ireland, and Isreal’, 195-216 in MCEVOY-LEVY, S. (ed.) Trouble Makers or Peacemakers? Youth and Post-Accord Peace Building. Indiana University of Notre Dame Press.
[9] UNITED NATIONS HIGH COMMISSIONER FOR REFUGEES (UNHCR) Sub-office Dadaab Operations Briefing Kit. Dadaab, UNHCR (unpublished document).