I’ve been thinking for the past day or two about how to best describe my visit to Kakuma but it’s proving very hard to capture in words that do it justice. The mix of extremes is one of the things that struck me most. Extreme poverty, extreme lack of resources, extreme resilience and extreme ingenuity. I’m not much for including quotes when I write but in this case the Viktor Frankl quote “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” seemed very fitting and something I kept thinking about as I met more and more people. Some of the refugees that I spoke with had been in the camp more than 20 years or had even been born there. A common theme in those that I met was hope and optimism. From an outsider’s perspective, it would be easy to imagine that people in Kakuma are in some sort of purgatory, their lives on pause, until some mysterious process decides it’s time for them to continue living and they are resettled elsewhere or repatriated to their home country (that is hopefully more stable). Many of the refugees I spoke with told me that when they first got to the camp, after the initial shock and boredom wore off, they also viewed their time there as a type of hellish purgatory. But their mindset eventually shifted as the reality of an uncertain timeline settled in and they made a conscious decision to continue living their lives, embrace their refugee community and thrive in spite of the harsh conditions. It’s the most powerful example of resilience I have ever seen up close. So it’s very hard to sum up my feelings in one sentence. On one hand, the living conditions are a nightmare with no running water, no electricity, periodic flooding, no toilets, cobras, scorpions, venomous spiders and temperatures reaching 115 F with no relief from any of it and nowhere to go. On the other hand, the people showed so much ingenuity in building and managing their communities that it was inspiring. I guess if I had to summarize it in one sentence, I’d say that I was able to leave when I wanted and they cannot. I walked out to a dirt runway and onto a UNHAS charter flight from Kakuma to Nairobi after a long 5 days (in a compound with air conditioning and running water) and when I looked down at the tin shacks from my plane taking off, I was thinking that Innocent the Soap Maker, Theresa, Innocent the Wifi Operator, Fulgence, Maker, Abdullah and all the other students I worked with during the weekend don’t have the option to leave. They are stuck. They’ll be sleeping in a dense slum in sweltering heat with no idea when they can leave because the world is just kind of fucked up in that way. And it’s all because of luck.
I landed in Kakuma on Wednesday July, 24th in the mid-morning on a charter flight thanks to the UNHAS (United Nations Humanitarian Air Service). They are the people who help get aid and supplies to remote locations around the world. We took off around 7:30 am from Wilson Airport in Nairobi. The view out the window leaving Nairobi is very green, lush and full of life. Once you are above the clouds, you spend the next hour wondering what to expect and before your imagination can run wild you are descending into an isolated desert dystopia. Kakuma is located in Northern Kenya in an arid region historically inhabited by the Turkana tribe. They are diplomatically referred to as the “host community” and dot the landscape with their herd animals. It’s worth noting that independent of Kakuma (and Kalobeyei), this is one of the poorest regions of Kenya and that has been a source of Turkana and refugee tensions . As you descend from the clouds, all the green that you remember from Nairobi is gone and you see a world of desert colors with few signs of life for miles and miles. Getting closer to the dirt runway, you start to see tin roofs clustered together at the Kalobeyei settlement.
And then boom, you slam down onto a dirt runway and you’ve arrived. There are a few people clustered behind a barbed wire fence to see who has arrived, probably out of boredom and nothing else to do. In my case, I looked around and was thinking “where the fuck am I?”. I was with my colleague Henrik Scheel and our World Economic Forum liaison Mahmoud Jabari (who quickly became a friend too).
There isn’t really a ton of time for thinking as you quickly greet a UN driver in a Toyota SUV (always Toyota!) who will bring you to one of the three secured UNHCR compounds on the periphery of the refugee camps. Our driver was Dominic. He was a Kenya from around Nairobi who worked for UNHCR. It seemed that most of the humanitarian workers were other Kenyans. They mostly stayed at Kakuma for 8 week cycles and then had a one week leave to go home to visit their families. On the drive from the airfield to the compound, you’ll get onto a well paved road that is completely out of place ( being built by a Chinese company), drive through Kakuma town which is a rundown strip of commercial shacks where the Turkana people congregate and you can buy some shampoo or any essentials you need (and get a few weird looks along the way). We stayed in UNHCR Compound 3 which was near the Kakuma 1 settlement.
I guess before going any further I should explain a few details about Kakuma Refugee Camp and Kalobeyei Integrated Settlement and a brief history of why they are there and an even briefer history of why I was there. Kakuma officially became a refugee camp in 1992 as Sundanese refugees fled down across the Sudan-Kenya border to escape war. Since then, its population has grown steadily over the years due to the instability and conflict across east Africa. There are now four distinct camps within Kakuma (creatively named Kakuma 1, Kakuma 2, Kakuma 3, Kakuma 4). Kakuma’s population also quickly expanded beyond South Sudanese and now comprises of Ethiopians, Ugandans, Burundians, Congolese, Somalis and South Sudanese. Kalobeyei Integrated Settlement was added in 2015 as an experimental community designed to integrate the refugees and Turkana people into an ecosystem where they could co-exist and also to test market based initiatives for supporting refugees. There definitely appears to be a shift in approach from “humanitarian assistance” to “development programs” ie from handouts to loans and other more sustainable programs which was interesting for me to see in both Kalobeyei and Kakuma. I saw this in the form of for-profit solar energy products for sale and housing stipends.
(Oh and before I forget… why was I there? To teach an entrepreneurship course with Henrik to refugee entrepreneurs).
Once we had put our bags down in the UNHCR compound, we received a security briefing about the camp. Not too much terrorism in the area, your garden variety cattle rustling and oh by the way watch out for the cobras, scorpions and “very fast” poisonous spiders. “We can keep the walls of the compound secure from people, but unfortunately snakes don’t need a password.” I am not sure how much joy Mohammed (the guy giving us the security brief) got from sharing the snake and scorpion bit…but I can say for sure it was definitely quite a lot. His performance lacked nothing in dramatic affect. I felt like I was in a Kenyan version of an old western for a brief moment and Mohammed was playing the role of Tuco.
After our security briefing, we got back into the Toyota SUV for our “learning journey” through Kakuma 1, Kakuma 3 and Kalobeyei. I forgot to mention the roads are not actually roads, they are just dirt with huge potholes and lots of rocks…so every car ride offers an opportunity to hit your head against the window or get sea sick. Pure bliss. We toured through the streets of Kakuma 1 which is by far the most populated of all the camp sites (and allegedly safest). What is really interesting about Kakuma 1 since it has been around so long and has seen waves of migration is all of the different ethnic neighborhoods like you might find in any other city. There is the Somali section, Ethiopian area, Congolese area, Sudanese area yet they all blend together and generally seem to co-exist together peacefully so I’m told. And it looked that way to me. Apparently, there is some occasional violence between groups, but its not so common. The most surprising thing to me about Kakuma 1 was how much commerce was taking place and how many businesses existed. In the absence of basically any infrastructure (running water, electricity, building materials), these groups had managed to develop a totally functional and thriving ecosystem of shops, restaurants, clothing stores, etc. I also learned about the “Bamba Chakula” system as an experimental pseudo-market based effort that provides refugees with food tokens to buy their own food from a variety of approved vendors (rather than just getting it directly from the World Food Program). After going to Kakuma 1, our visit to Kakuma 3 was nothing to write home about. It’s like going from Manhattan to Statin Island.
Our next stop in Kalobeyei was very cool. We met a single mother named Mary and her 3 children. She invited us into her modest brick home which she built herself. With the translation of a UNHCR worker, the two explained to us how the Kalobeyei settlement was successfully testing the idea of giving its refugee residents actual money to be used to buy building materials from preferred vendors and then being taught to construct small brick houses. For Mary this had been a life changer, because she could now sleep at night with her children and not worry about being robbed or assaulted as would be more likely with a less sturdy home. This was also the first time I had a chance to interact with young children during the trip. Since I recently had my first daughter (3 months ago), these interactions with children were the most emotional for me. The kids largely seemed to be in good spirits, but I couldn’t help but feel sad seeing kids need to grow up like this as a result of no choice of their own. My daughter Scarlett could just as easily be naked outside a muddy hut with a simple twist of fate. Imagining her in these conditions made it a lot more real for me. That was probably what I found most difficult about the whole trip (though the individual stories from people about how they got to Kakuma is a close second).
After our learning journey on the first day, we went back to the compound (we had a 6 pm curfew every night), sat around since there isn’t much going on and then got prepared for our two day workshop with 30 refugee entrepreneurs. Our main concern going into the workshop was whether our examples and learning material would be relevant or would fall flat. It turns out it was a mixed bag but mostly went great.
The next morning, Dominic drove us like bouncing pinballs in the Toyota SUV over to UNHCR Compound 1 where many of the NGOs have offices and for our particular purposes to the DCA (Danish Church Aid) office who had done all the heavy lifting to facilitate our workshop. They are a great organization (at least their Kakuma sub office) and nothing we did would have been possible without them. From their office, we headed over to something of a community room where we would be doing our workshop (without air conditioning of course). We started at 8 am and everyone arrived relatively promptly (except a few stragglers). The next two days were pretty much a blur of entrepreneurship training where we went over topics like identifying a business problem, creating a business model canvas, learning how to do data driven marketing, pitching your business, budgeting, etc. I don’t need to bore you with the details of all that, but the students were extremely enthusiastic and participated fully in everything. It went amazingly well.
There were of course a few contextual elements of the presentation that fell flat.
· “Who here has heard of Silicon Valley?”- 0 people
· “They call it an elevator pitch because you can say it all while you are still on an elevator. How many of you have been on an elevator?”- 2 people
· “A business model that is becoming popular is AirBnb. Who knows what that is?”- 0 people
· A slide that said “If you are passionate about your work, you’ll never have to work a day in your life”…not sure that was the right message here…but maybe it was ok?
We learned about a range of businesses from companies supplying WiFi to other refugees, retail stores, wholesale tailor and zipper distributors, a soap manufacturer, filmmakers, a salon owner, clothing shops, restaurants (called Hotels), an MPESA agent, a micro lending company, a cleaning company, etc.
While the businesses themselves and how they might be differentiated beyond price in such a constrained setting were interesting to think about, the people were far more compelling. Here are a few of them.
· Theresa was a young salon owner in Kakuma. She received a cosmetology license and wanted to open her own salon because prices were too high in other salons for a blow dry and other services. She started her business with 700 shillings ($7) and one chair. Since she began, she’s grown to have three chairs and also started receiving requests for men’s haircuts so she hired a Congolese man to help (since a lot of men didn’t want their hair cut from a woman). On the second day of our workshop, she stood up and confidently delivered her elevator pitch about her salon and how she has grown it. Later that day I found out that she had been robbed the night before and someone stole all of her equipment. The dissonance between watching her pitch and later knowing that while she was pitching, she knew that her entire business had been stolen was crazy. Apparently, that was the one night she didn’t sleep in her salon. Her ability to stand in front of a group of people and tell her story so confidently as if she hadn’t been robbed of everything hours earlier is a good example to me of what “another day in the life” of a refugee can be like. I wish that story were an outlier…but based on everything I experienced it most definitely is not.
· I met a Congolese young man who had escaped Congo because his mother “was able to scream for her children to run away in order to save themselves while her throat was slit by a rival tribe”. He told the story so emotionlessly as if I asked him what color the sky was. In Kakuma, he was working on a cleaning business. He said that he had a friend in camp who died of Cholera because of scattered filth and wanted to make sure the conditions were better for everyone, especially children to live in. His business was struggling to thrive and it wasn’t because of competition. He wasn’t yet able to convince people that a cleaning service was a basic need worth paying for. First came water, food, clothes then WiFi data.
· Maker was a very smart and friendly South Sudanese entrepreneur who had started a micro lending business that was growing. He has been living in Kakuma for 19 years and his sister recently was resettled to Arizona (so hopefully he will be able to go there too). The constraint on his business was access to capital. It is very difficult for anyone to invest in even a promising refugee business because of the challenges of getting the money OUT of the business and back to the investor. You might ask why the ecosystem is constructed in a way that makes it difficult to get money out of a refugee camp. I was confused by this at first, but it was explained to me that it is a major political issue in Kenya. From the perspective of many Kenyan’s, refugees are supposed to be temporary. And if all the constraints around their businesses were removed, they would then be able to operate freely, grow their businesses and have less incentive to leave.
· Innocent The Soap Maker was a chemist by education before coming to Kakuma. At his school where he studied, they didn’t have money for actual chemical supplies so most of what he knew was theoretical. When he arrived at Kakuma, he began studying YouTube videos to learn how to mix chemicals correctly to make good quality soaps. Since then he has become the only major soap wholesaler in the entire camp and employs 18 people. We took a brief tour of his soap factory in Kakuma 3. He would greatly benefit from an investor to buy industrial equipment to up his production capacity to meet demand.
· Fulgence was a Congolese man I met who was separated from his wife in a machine gun attack in Tanzania. She was resettled to the US and he has a 1 year old child (from when she visited him in Kakuma last year) that he has never met. He runs a small restaurant and is certainly not faring as well as some of other entrepreneurs.
· A Turkana young man who had a small food store that he used to pay so his family could eat. He was now trying to go to college and needed his sister to run the store and make $60/mo so he could pay for his studies, but he was struggling to teach her to run it effectively and as a result hasn’t been able to pay his school fees for the past 6 months.
The two day workshop ended on Sunday and the reviews from the students exceeded our expectations and confirmed to us that an entrepreneur is an entrepreneur regardless of the conditions.
We spent one additional day working with the DCA staff to get them up to speed on the material we covered in the workshop so they could provide mentorship over the next 12 weeks and while the WEF Young Global Leaders visit Kakuma this week.
On our last (and probably best) day in Kakuma we met up with a different Innocent (not the soap maker). Innocent was introduced to Henrik through a mutual friend and he agreed to show us around and give us more of a local experience. We spent the morning by going to his house and meeting his wife and two cute kids. He mentioned to us that he had recently built this house a month ago as his previous one had flooded and been destroyed in June. Innocent was originally from Goma in Eastern Congo. His father was an independent journalist and 10 years ago disappeared and was taken away by government forces (there is so much corruption there that the government can be just as bad as any militia). He has not spoken to his father since and doesn’t know if he is alive or dead. He had to escape Congo at that time for his safety and ended up in Kakuma by himself. He has one brother in Uganda that he is in touch with. It was a crazy and sad story, but what struck me more deeply about Innocent, is that of all the people we met he seemed to be the smartest, most capable and most savvy. I could easily see him thriving in my life, if only for a different cast of the die. This was the first time I felt viscerally that someone just like me could be living in a place like this. That if it had gone another way, I could be showing Innocent around and he could be leaving on the UNHCR flight when things started to get too uncomfortable. He showed us his WiFi business and how he constructed an innovative system using solar energy, a generator and a data throttle to offer Kakuma residents access to 24/7 wireless internet up to 700 kbps. He told us about his Boda Boda business and how he is helping local residents lease to own their own motorcycles rather than fall victim to the current model of daily rentals and effective indentured servitude. He had gotten married and built his family in Kakuma over the past 10 years. He doesn’t know when he’ll be resettled.
We spent the afternoon playing soccer with young South Sudanese kids. After all what is a trip anywhere without a soccer game. I discovered they have organized leagues every Sunday and each community has their own all star team. Seeing the kids smile while kicking the ball around with the big “Muzungus” (white guys) was one of the highlights of my trip. In spite of all the horrors that might lead someone to Kakuma, soccer never ceases to make people happy and offers hope. Maybe that’s part of why I’ve always liked it so much. My only qualm with Kakuma is that everyone is an Arsenal or Manchester United fan. I’d like to see more Barcelona jersey’s next time I’m in town. A little more respect for “La Pulga” please. On the topic of sports in Kakuma, I also learned that they have a dedicated yoga room and a full time track team.
So what is my takeaway? It is really depressing to see that with all the money and technology in the world we have so many people living this way and the number is going up each year. I don’t know what the solution is, but I saw three very positive trends that I think will make a a major dent in global poverty over the next 5 years.
· Solar Energy. Seeing examples of people’s homes being lit up and powered using affordable solar energy systems provides hope for being able to enjoy more modern essentials like refrigeration, powering phones and computers, etc.
· Satellite Internet or 4G. Right now, data is just too expensive for most Kakuma residents to use the internet freely. When that changes there is going to be an explosion of knowledge and learning. This will be the day that they fully join the digital economy. I already have met refugees with bachelors and even master’s degrees they obtained online while in Kakuma.
· Market based development. From my observation, the aid model being used to deploy resources to refugees is undergoing a major shift from grants and handouts to more sustainable growth strategies like providing loans and developing new frameworks to create competitive environments which are market driven. Refugee education like the workshop that we facilitated is on the rise as well.
My five days at Kakuma are over and I’m on the plane home now. I hope to be back. This trip had a major impact on my life. It’s one thing to know abstractly that people are forced to live this way, it’s another to see it up close.