‘There I had free education’: Ex-Somali refugee
Somali refugees fetching water at Dadaab in Kenya on July 31, 2011. FILE PHOTO | AFP
By AFP
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BAIDOA
As a teenager, Aden Hussein chose to become a refugee to get an education.
With Somalia in collapse, he left his family for neighbouring Kenya where Dadaab, one of the largest and oldest refugee camps in the world, offered a de-facto city served by the UN and dozens of aid agencies.
“There I had free education,” he said.
Last August, six years after arriving, Hussein, now 21, took advantage of a repatriation package offered to Somali refugees when the Kenyan government said it would close the camp.
Hussein said he was given $400 and promised healthcare, shelter and schooling — the same benefits he enjoyed in Dadaab.
Human rights organisations have protested that refugees are being coerced into returning to a war zone where none of these services are available and, in the end, Hussein only received the cash.
He is bitterly disappointed that he has not been able to finish high-school since his return to Baidoa in southwestern Somalia.
CASUALTIES OF CHAOS
In the past 18 months more than 50,000 refugees have left Dadaab for Somalia, a country that has been a byword for “failed state” since civil war felled the government in 1991.
One of the countless casualties of the chaos is the national education system which successive fragile governments have failed to rebuild.
The only schools outside the major cities are Islamic madrases and the ones that are functioning lack properly trained teachers or a standardised curriculum.
Patrick Mbugua, the Somalia Researcher for Amnesty International, who recently returned from a fact-finding mission in Baidoa said that the majority of refugees he spoke to said their children were not in schools.
Those who were, found a school system in shambles.
PUBLIC SCHOOLS
Of the 29 schools in Baidoa, some are privately-run and follow the Ethiopian, Kenyan, Ugandan or even Qatari curriculums while public schools adhere to a Somali curriculum dating back to the pre-war era and unchanged in more than 20 years.
By contrast, all schools in Dadaab follow the “very modern” Kenyan curriculum.
“[The] education system in Somalia is not fully functional and continues to face challenges,” Julien Navier, a UNHCR Senior External Relations Officer said.
Navier said that returnee parents can opt to keep their children in the academies that follow the Kenyan program.
The refugees are having a hard time upon returning to their motherland.
NGOS and INGOS see the move as threatenig their source of funding and jobs,but on a sober note note what do you think should be done?
And also for those in the know,after schooling while in daadab camp,where do they go and who absorbs them? Just a random thought