www.Bartamaha.com / DADAAB UPDATE – “The average daily arrivals for the first week of August was over 1,400 and that brings the new arrivals to that camp so far this year to about 127,000. In July, we had more than we ever had in the 20-year history of the camp. It was over 40,000 people and it looks like we’re well on the way to that again,” said UNHCR spokesman Ron Redmond, who spent most of this week at Dadaab. (To listen to interview click on the player below)
Getting bigger
Initially, Dadaab was constructed to hold about 90,000 people. However, it’s been expanded to accommodate several hundred thousand.
“That was a problem for the last couple of years because the Kenyans did not want us to put more people in that camp. But there are so many coming across that we’ve agreed now that we’ll open two new additions to the camp. One of them is called the Ifo Extension, which is part of the old Ifo camp, but it’s a new area there. We’re going to put 90,000 people in that site,” he said.
The second expansion is called Cambios, a totally new camp. It will be the fourth large refugee camp at Dadaab and will also hold 90,000 refugees.
Redmond said, “If the numbers coming in continue as they have been, we’re probably going to fill both of those in the next four to six months.”
- There’s no slowdown in the number of Somalis arriving at the Dadaab refugee camps in northeastern Kenya. The U.N. refugee agency (UNHCR) says thousands more are arriving each week. Drought and famine are forcing many people to walk 15 to 20 days in dry, dusty weather to reach the camps.
