Showing posts with label Kenya. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Kenya. Show all posts

Friday, October 25, 2019





Posted by at
Labels: , ,

Thursday, March 8, 2018












In all her years as an Academy Award–winning actress and director, Angelina Jolie—the most glamorous woman on the planet—never went to a fashion show. “I hadn’t been to one before,” the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) Special Envoy says of the experience of finding herself seated front row during a visit to a refugee shelter in Nairobi, Kenya, last June. “But it was my kind of runway: the most beautiful girls, survivors with their heads held high, bringing forward their own designs and culture; showing how it’s possible to find your femininity again after it has been brutally attacked.”

The shelter Jolie visited on World Refugee Day is run by RefuSHE, an NGO that seeks to fill a crucial gap in care for girls and young women between the ages of 13 and 23 fleeing Somalia, South Sudan, and other war-torn countries in the region. “All the girls I met had been separated from their families or had seen their parents killed,” says Jolie. “Almost all had suffered sexual violence, and many had given birth after being raped.” RefuSHE provides counseling and shelter and conducts a multidisciplinary education program.

RefuSHE fashion show in Nairobi, Kenya
UNHCR/Mark Henley

With the support of UNHCR, RefuSHE also encourages economic empowerment by teaching the young women to make colorful scarves using resist-dyeing, a traditional East African technique similar to tie-dye. This gives the refugees a marketable skill that can help set them on a path toward financial independence. One hundred percent of the proceeds from the scarves they make are reinvested into the program and its artisans; since 2010, nearly 70 percent of them have become self-sufficient.

“I thought the girls represented their culture and their craft in a way that was so impressive,” Jolie says of the runway show, which culminated in the audience rising to its feet and dancing with the models. “They are women in full.” The program is part of a UNHCR initiative, MADE51, that aims to bring market access to refugee artisans.

 
RefuSHE bag, $65, shop.refushe.org.

Now MADE51 is helping RefuSHE expand its product line with a new range of bags made by artisans living in Kakuma, a refugee camp in northwest Kenya where Jolie built a school for girls, and at the nearby Kalobeyei Settlement. The fabric will be hand-dyed in Nairobi and then sent to Kakuma, where the artisans will tailor it into totes, shoppers, and clutches. From there the bags will be sent to Kalobeyei, where a group of Ethiopian artisans, renowned for their beading skills, will add embellishments.

“There is so much talent within refugee populations that goes to waste because people are not allowed to work or are not able to work,” Jolie says. For Halima Aden, a 20-year-old Somali-American model who spent the first seven years of her life in Kakuma, the RefuSHE program is a welcome addition to camp life, where enterprising women rely on a barter economy of trading incense or braiding hair to make ends meet.“I wish my mom had something like that in the camp,” Aden says. “As a refugee, sometimes you feel like you don’t have a say in the world, so it’s nice that women can now have a hand in their own destinies. The craft they learn is something they can take with them because knowledge sticks with you.”

By integrating various artisanal skills and spreading the work among different camps, the program gives the maximum number of refugees an opportunity to apply their skills and earn an income, which is especially important in the remote Kenyan camps where the semi-arid climate is unsuitable for agriculture. MADE51 projects that if retailers get involved and place orders, there is the potential to create 12,000 new jobs in Kenya alone. “We need more initiatives like this,” Jolie says, pointing to refugee-artisan communities in 70 countries, ranging from Rwandan basket­makers to Afghan kilim weavers, that could also benefit from MADE51. “Nobody wants to be a refugee or to live on aid,” she adds. “They want to lead dignified, useful lives, like any of us. So I hope this is just the beginning.”



Posted by at
Labels: , ,

Tuesday, August 9, 2011

Dadaab even more dire

Kenyan Camp Visited by Angelina Jolie Is Last Stop for Somali’s Refugees

By Flavia Krause-Jackson - Aug 9, 2011 12:01 AM ET

When Angelina Jolie visited Dadaab two years ago, she described conditions as “dire.” The world’s biggest refugee camp today is bursting with the daily arrival of 1,500 Somalis escaping Africa’s worst famine in six decades.

The three-settlement complex in Kenya, 100 kilometers (62 miles) south of the Somali border, was created to house 90,000 people displaced by the Somali civil war that followed the 1991 ouster of dictator Mohamed Siad Barre. It’s now hosting more than 400,000 and a new ad-hoc extension has been opened to ease the overcrowding.

“A lot of people have died just trying to get here,” said Jeremy Hobbs, Executive Director of Oxfam International, in a telephone interview from Dadaab, where a quarter the children arrived malnourished. “It’s overwhelming.”

Once at Dadaab, a tent city spread over 50 square kilometers, refugees are supposed to get a three-week ration of food -- corn meal, sugar, and beans -- plastic sheets, cooking utensils, a jerry can, sleeping mats and soap.

Instead, they are met with endless lines at the registration office as aid agencies such as Oxfam International and CARE struggle to meet the demands of a drought-triggered plight that threatens to engulf almost half of Somalia’s 7.5 million inhabitants. Food prices in Somalia have more than tripled from a year ago because of scarcity.

Babies and Cows

One mother, having walked weeks to get to a clinic, realized upon lifting her child off her back that the baby had died, said CARE worker Alexandra Lopoukhine, describing what she witnessed in Dadaab. Most new arrivals are women and children. Many of the men have stayed behind to tend dying livestock.

“I met a father who recently lost his wife, and he was there nursing his five remaining cows,” Wouter Schaap, assistant director for CARE in Somalia, told a U.S. Senate committee at an Aug. 3 hearing. “The cows were bleeding from their noses, and he was trying to do something about it but not really knowing what to do.”

Famine has been declared in five regions of Somalia and the United Nations expects it to spread across all regions within two months. Dadaab, a focal point of the humanitarian effort, has drawn international attention.

President Barack Obama today approved $105 million in famine relief for the Horn of Africa. A U.S. team, led by Jill Biden, wife of U.S. Vice President Joe Biden, arrived yesterday, the latest in a series of high-profile visitors.

‘Saint Angelina’

Nicknamed ‘Saint Angelina’ for her humanitarian work as a UN goodwill ambassador, Jolie observed in a September 2009 tour of the camp how people in Dadaab lived among garbage and sewage.

“If this is the better solution, what must it be like in Somalia?” she asked in a video posted by the UN refugee agency.

The answer lies with the 116,000 starving Somalis that so far this year have braved bandit-infested hinterlands, where women are frequently raped during a journey that can last weeks, to reach by foot what for them is the promised land.

The stricken head to one of three locations where they’ve been told they can be saved: the capital Mogadishu, Dadaab or neighboring Ethiopia.

Somalia hasn’t had a functioning government in two decades and the factional fighting makes aid delivery risky. The UN Refugee Agency flew to Mogadishu yesterday to deliver its first shipment of emergency supplies in five years.

Al-Shabaab, which has pledged allegiance to al-Qaeda, withdrew from the capital in a move that may offer residents of the war-torn country some respite. The militant group had banned the UN World Food Programme and other aid agencies from working in areas under its control.

Worst to Come

Wouter Schaap, an aids worker for CARE who just returned from inspecting famine-stricken parts of Somalia, warned that the worse is yet to come as the deepest part of a drought typically hits a month before the start of the rainy season in October. That in turn triggers a new set of problems with the spread of waterborne diseases such as cholera.

The UN said $2.5 billion is needed to confront the humanitarian crisis, with only $1.4 billion pledged.

“The worry is that the scale of the unfolding tragedy is so massive and the response so far has been too little,” Schaap in a telephone interview from Nairobi.

To contact the reporters on this story: Flavia Krause-Jackson in Washington at fjackson@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Mark Silva at msilva34@bloomberg.net

Posted by at
Labels: ,
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)