Somali Refugees,Informality,and Self-initiative at Local Integration in Ethiopia and Kenya

Abstract

As the number of refugees has continued to grow in post-independence Africa, host governments across the continent have developed stringent refugee policies that are detached from historical transborder relationships in which refugees and host communities interact. The stringent policies are underpinned by the assumption that host communities view refugees from the state-centric perspective of non-citizens as undesirable foreigners or outsiders. Host governments’ insistence that the solution lies in refugees eventually repatriating to their countries of origin drives refugee policies that undermine solutions instead of building and capitalizing on solutions generated at the level of host communities.

The exclusion of local histories and social dynamics in host regions has led to policies that neither hold up to humanitarian standards nor serve their intended non-integration objectives. Some host governments are reluctant to implement local integration and have maintained exclusionary policies for a long period of time when the realities in the host communities show that refugees are included and participate in various community activities. Host governments perpetuate this disjuncture between policy and local practice by assuming or pretending that refugees will wait for repatriation instead of finding solutions in the host countries where some of them have lived for decades. Contrary to the non-integration objectives of official encampment policies and scholarship that assumes that the absence of official integration policies deters integration, many refugees have defied the stereotypical portrayal of refugees as “bare life” which denotes prioritization of mere survival as opposed to the quality of life. They have managed to find solutions and live their lives as active and productive members of their host countries.

This article specifically addresses the situation of Somali refugees in Ethiopia and Kenya. It argues that the absence of local integration policies or reluctance by host governments to implement them where they exist does not automatically mean that refugees are unable to integrate in their host countries. Host government policies against integration are mediated by refugees’ self-initiative and resourcefulness. These characteristics are facilitated by host communities whose ties and mutual dependence with refugees, cultivated pre- and post-flight, play an important role in engendering solidarity and circumventing policies that hamper refugees’ quest for long-term solutions.

Based on the research findings, the paper recommends that host governments pursue policies that are informed by the shared needs and interests between refugee and host communities and that build on the social dynamics and relationships in refugee-hosting regions.

Introduction

As a durable solution, local integration has stalled as countries in the global South facing refugee influxes and protracted situations have continued to pursue the encampment policies. The lack of integration opportunities, coupled with the unlikelihood of voluntary return, has left refugees in protracted situations, jostling for severely limited third-country resettlement places. However, the absence of official local integration policies in some countries and the lack of implementation of these policies in others have not necessarily left the refugees in a state of helplessness. Rather, refugees’ self-initiative and resourcefulness, supported by host communities, can drive integration even when policies seek to obstruct it. Some refugees have voted with their feet by leaving the camps notwithstanding encampment policies while others have converted the camps into home as opposed to temporary spaces where they presumably wait for repatriation. This article draws from the circumstances of Somali refugees in Ethiopia and Kenya who have lived in a protracted situation spanning three decades. Using qualitative data collected from Somali refugees living in camps in Ethiopia and Kenya as well as from members of host communities and national and regional government officials, the article argues that the absence of official local integration policy and action does not necessarily translate into the absence of integration particularly in its economic and sociocultural dimensions.

The article specifically discusses the role of informal practices and social relations between refugees and host communities in refugee integration. Even without documents that would facilitate legal integration and place refugees on a path toward naturalization, Somali refugees in Ethiopia and Kenya have taken the initiative over the years to find solutions through informal channels and structures that have enabled them to live in a state of de facto economic and sociocultural integration. Using informal channels and structures, this community illustrates how self-initiative and resourcefulness enable refugees to wiggle out of the state of limbo inherent in encampment regimes, create a home, and build a new life in spaces originally designed for waiting for repatriation. In discussing refugees’ initiative, the article also stresses the role of host communities in facilitating informal integration. Notwithstanding the absence of local integration policies or host governments’ failure or reluctance to implement them, kinship, affinal, religious, and business ties between host and refugee communities play an important role in facilitating informal local integration. This is the case for Somali refugees in a region where Somalis straddle the border between Somalia and Ethiopia as well as between Somalia and Kenya. In response, host governments in Kenya and Ethiopia should acknowledge the historical ties between refugees and their communities and establish policies that build on these ties. Such policies, built around local structures and institutions with which both refugees and host communities identify, have the potential to produce sustainable outcomes long after external actors have departed from the scene.

Data Collection

This article in based on research conducted by both authors with Somali refugees. Abdirahman Ahmed Muhumad conducted research with encamped Somali refugees in the Somali region of Ethiopia, and Rose Jaji with Somali refugees living in Kenya as part of a broader research project on encamped and urban refugees in Kenya. The research in Ethiopia, which was carried out between 2020 and 2022, used surveys, interviews, and focus group discussions with refugees in Awbare, Sheder, and Kebribayah refugee camps and the host communities. Abdirahman Ahmed Muhumad also interviewed regional and national government officials, representatives of the United Nations (UN), international non-governmental organizations (INGOs), and local NGOs, the government’s Administration for Refugee and Returnee Affairs (now Refugee and Returnee Service), and civil society organizations including refugee coordination committees in Addis Ababa, Jigjiga, Awbare, and Sheder.

The first phase of research with Somali refugees in Kenya started as part of Rose Jaji’s doctoral fieldwork with refugees in Kenya conducted in 2006 and 2007. This research was ethnographic; Rose Jaji lived for six months among the refugees in Nairobi’s poor neighborhoods that hosted the majority of the refugees. The research involved interviews and focus group discussions with refugees from Central and the Horn of Africa, including Somalis. She also interviewed the government’s Department of Refugee Affairs (now Refugee Affairs Secretariat), the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), refugee organizations, and civil society organizations dealing with refugee issues. Follow-up research took place in 2016 and from 2021 to 2022. The latter mainly focused on Somali refugees living in Dadaab refugee camp. This region is important because the governments are hosts to the largest number of refugees on the continent. In addition, studying Somali refugees hosted in Ethiopia and Kenya provided interesting insights into the formal policy-local dynamics interface.

The Nation-State, Somalis, and Refugee Hosting in Ethiopia and Kenya

A brief historical overview is important for a better understanding of the dynamics occurring in regions that host Somali refugees in Ethiopia and Kenya. Somalis live in the greater Horn of Africa. Before European colonial powers partitioned Africa into colonial states at the Berlin Conference in 1884, Somalis occupied a vast territory, which includes part of what is now Somalia, Somaliland, ¹ Djibouti, the Somali region in Ethiopia, and the northeastern region of Kenya. These areas — which share culture, language, religion, and traditions — have mainly operated as one cultural and economic entity, albeit straddling borders of the four countries (Samatar 2020). The colonial borders that split Somalis into different countries did not necessarily sever historical ties forged around kinship, religion, shared language, and culture. Transborder relations among the Somalis continued and were facilitated by the porosity of borders in the region and on the African continent in general. Border regions on the continent are hives of transborder activity outside formal state structures and control due to the limited presence of states in these regions. For many people living in these regions, borders are a mere technicality, which has not interfered much with business, marriage, kinship, and religious ties among co-ethnics living on both sides.

Somalis have also maintained relations through cross-border trade (Hagmann 2021). For instance, the Somali region in Ethiopia is the major source of livestock which is transported from Berbera port of Somaliland to the Gulf states by businesspeople from Somaliland. Likewise, Somaliland is the major source of imported items, such as electronics and food, for the Somali region and, indeed, the rest of Ethiopia. Much of the trade in livestock occurs through informal channels between traders from the Somali region and Somaliland. In fact, this informal trade surpasses the volume of formal trade (Abdi and Hagmann 2019; Abdi 2021). The Somali diasporas in the different territories (Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya, Somaliland, and Somalia) have invested in the major cities of the region. During the different violent conflicts in Somalia, flight across the border brought Somali citizens into areas inhabited by Somalis who happened to be citizens of the neighboring country. The Somali refugees hosted in the Somali region of Ethiopia in the 1980s and early 1990s and in the northeastern region of Kenya also played a significant role in the cross-border trade (Michaelson 1999). They settled in areas close to the border with Somalia and continued to trade with their relatives who remained in Somalia. The refugees maintained social ties with their Somali host communities after repatriation (Abdi 2021).

In Kenya, Dadaab refugee camp was established initially for a population of 90,000 people. By the end of 2011, an additional 130,000 refugees had arrived from south-central Somalia (UNHCR 2022a). The total number of Somali refugees in Kenya spiked to half a million in Dadaab making it one of the largest population centers in Kenya (Lindley and Hammond 2014). To cater to the new Somali refugee influx in the Dadaab camp complex, two additional camps of Ifo 2 and Kabioos were established in 2011. However, after the number of refugees in Dadaab was reduced due to the voluntary return program, these two camps were closed in 2017 and 2018 respectively. As of December 2022, there are 279, 925 Somali refugees in Kenya’s Garissa, Nairobi, and Turkana regions (UNHCR 2022c). As in Ethiopia, Somali refugees in Kenya predominantly fled to the area close to the Kenya-Somalia border. They were not relocated inland into Kenya due to security-related concerns and the general tendency in African host countries to accommodate refugees from neighboring countries close to the border in order to facilitate repatriation (Jaji 2012).

What were the refugee policies that guided the hosting of Somali refugees who fled conflict and settled in the camps in Ethiopia and Kenya? It is clear from the foregoing that Kenya and Ethiopia hosted the refugees in camps even though they fled to areas predominantly inhabited by fellow Somalis. Accommodating refugees in camps is not unique to the two countries. Many African countries have hosted refugees in camps as far back as the colonial era. For example, countries such as Zambia, Tanzania, and, later on, Mozambique set up camps for refugees fleeing violence caused by anticolonial struggles in Angola, Namibia, and Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). Due to the welcoming nature of refugee policies in these countries during this period, refugee encampment was not as stringent as it has become and refugees were incorporated into developmental projects such as Ujamaa (villagization) in Tanzania (Chaulia 2003; Rosenthal 2015).

Ethiopia is known not only for hosting refugees but also for maintaining an open-door policy for those fleeing from conflict, insecurities, and environmental hazards (Abede 2018). In its modern history, the first Sudanese civil war in the early 1960s marked the first major refugee influx into Ethiopia. As a result, Ethiopia established the first refugee camp, Itang, in Gambella in 1969 to host Sudanese refugees (Thomas 2015; Vemuru, Sarkar, and Fitri Woodhouse 2020). As one of the first African signatories of the 1951 Refugee Convention, Ethiopia was home to Harta-Sheik, one of the largest refugee camps in the world which has since closed, and Itang camp for Somali and Sudanese refugees (Nigusie and Carver 2019; Carver, Gedi, and Naish 2020). After Uganda and Sudan with more than a million refugees each, Ethiopia is the third largest refugee-hosting country in Africa with a refugee population of over 864,000 (UNHCR 2022b). Ethiopia pursued a strict encampment policy for the refugees within its borders. Under the 2004 refugee law, refugees were not allowed to move freely in Ethiopia. Encampment remained at the core of Ethiopia’s refugee policy with the exception of Eritrean refugees who were allowed to live outside the camps through the revised 2010 out-of-camp policy (Asabu 2018).

Kenya hosted refugees who fled anticolonial and anti-apartheid struggles in Rhodesia and South Africa ² in line with the pan-Africanist policies pursued by Jomo Kenyatta, the first president of independent Kenya. The country continued to pursue what has been termed a laissez faire policy, ³ which granted refugees the right to work and did not deter refugee integration until 1991 when an influx of refugees from Sudan and Somalia led the government to adopt policies of encampment. Specifically designated camps were established as the place of residence for refugees. In Kenya, the Kakuma and Dadaab refugee camps became the hallmarks of refugee encampment with the former primarily hosting Sudanese refugees as well as refugees from the Great Lakes region while the latter predominantly hosted refugees from Somalia. Kenya, which had hosted refugees fleeing violent anticolonial and anti-apartheid struggles in Southern Africa and post-independence refugees from East, Central, and the Horn of Africa, deported refugees from Rwanda and Uganda in the 1990s (Verdirame and Harrell-Bond 2005). Many urban refugees lived in fear of harassment, raids, and arbitrary arrests under President Daniel arap Moi. These violations of refugees’ rights abated with the presidency of Mwai Kibaki who came to power in 2002. Under the presidency of Uhuru Kenyatta, violations of refugees’ rights, however, escalated for Somali refugees whom Kenya accuses of abetting terrorists (Human Rights Watch 2013; Jaji 2013, 2014). This is against the backdrop of terrorist attacks blamed on al Shabaab, the Somali militant group. High profile terrorist attacks on Kenya in recent times occurred at Westgate Mall in 2013, Mpeketoni in 2014, Garissa University College in 2015, and DusitD2 Complex in 2019. Considering the perception of refugees as posing a security threat and economic burden, local integration ceased to be an option favored by host governments (Lindley and Hammond 2014). Kenya remains reluctant to integrate Somali refugees as the section below illustrates.

Current Refugee Policies in Ethiopia and Kenya

It has not been until very recently that Ethiopia and Kenya have begun to consider relaxing the encampment regime. Both countries agreed to be among the 15 pilot countries for the Comprehensive Refugee Response Framework (CRRF). Ethiopia has been at the forefront of the latest attempts to improve the lives of refugees and find lasting solutions. This is due to the government’s long-standing commitment to protecting refugees and the recent steps taken by the government to revise its refugee policies and integrate refugees into national systems (Binkert et al. 2021) and its growing economic potential to integrate refugees (Abebe 2018). As a result of these efforts and great donor interest, Ethiopia co-convened the first Global Refugee Forum. Ethiopia announced nine pledges in 2016 as part of its commitment to improving the lives of refugees within its borders. This was followed by the National Comprehensive Refugee and Response Strategy (NCRRS) which serves as the road map that shapes the support provided to refugees. The nine pledges cover a wide range of rights granted to refugees and these include access to work and basic services such as health, education, and an out-of-camp policy which, as indicated above, was initially limited to the Eritrean refugees. The pledges extend the out-of-camp policy to all refugees hosted in Ethiopia and allows them to benefit from existing opportunities to become self-reliant (ARRA 2017). The aim of the government’s pledges was to move away from the traditional encampment approach and ensure a sustainable approach to refugee care by locally integrating them and including them in national development plans.

Ethiopia’s efforts to implement the CRRF peaked with the revision of the 2004 refugee law and the passing of the new refugee law in January 2019. The new legal framework focuses on local integration of refugees as a durable solution, unlike the previous law that emphasized the protection of refugees. The law, which codifies the nine pledges and the CRRF ideas, has been described as a model law and one of the most progressive refugee laws on the continent. Despite the exemplary policy and legal framework established by the Ethiopian government to find durable solutions for refugees, no significant achievements have been reached in implementing the law and translating it into practice. The reality is that refugee protection and management have not yet changed in Ethiopia. This is mainly due to the lack of secondary legislation to guide the implementation of the law. This lack of legal clarity has led to sluggish implementation of the CRRF in Ethiopia (Binkert et al. 2021). For instance, refugees have not been granted work permits.

Similarly, refugees have not been included in national plans and services to refugees and host communities are delivered by different institutions. National, regional, and local governments plan and provide services to Ethiopian citizens while UNHCR and INGOs, in coordination with the Refugee and Returnee Services, a national agency responsible for coordination of refugee affairs, plan and deliver services to refugees. Despite Ethiopia’s stated openness to integrating refugees, many Somali refugees remain in the camps without work permits. Service provision and management remain as they were before the CRRF. According to one of the key informants from one of the bilateral organizations in Ethiopia’s Somali region:

Lack of translation of the laws into implementable directives has led to the fact that refugee management in Ethiopia largely remains the same as it was before the CRRF. Now we have trained refugees and hosts with short-term skills needed by the refugees to engage in work and become self-reliant. But you need the law to be implemented and work permits to be granted to the refugees so that they can formally engage in the labor market. That is still missing.

Kenya’s deportation of Ugandan and Rwandan refugees in the 1990s portended its current threats to forcibly repatriate refugees (especially Somalis) and close the camps. The most recent of such threats occurred in April 2021 when the country’s minister of interior announced through a tweet the country’s intention to close the camps. Although Kenya has not followed through on this threat, it is clear that the country wishes to rid itself of the humanitarian obligation to host refugees. It increasingly sees refugees, especially Somalis, as a security threat. This has led to securitization of this refugee community. In a context where refugees are increasingly seen as burdens rather than assets and as agents of insecurity rather than people displaced by insecurity, Kenya has shifted from its earlier laissez faire policy, which enabled refugees from Uganda among others to seek formal employment and provide professional skills needed in the country and become self-reliant (Verdirame and Harrell-Bond 2005). Kenya’s refugee acts before the 2021 Refugee Act unambiguously pronounced its pursuit of refugee encampment policy. This shift in policy has seen Kenya advocate repatriation and third country resettlement and eschew local integration as a durable solution.

However, Kenya’s formal policies appear to be inconsistent as one can observe in its differential treatment of Somali and Sudanese refugees. Kenya enacted a new refugee act in 2021 which gives refugees the right to education, healthcare, and to seek employment. It agreed to be one of the 15 pilot countries for implementation of the CRRF. It also consented to the development of Kalobeyei Integrated Social and Economic Development Program (KISEDP) in Turkana West where Kakuma refugee camp is located. KISEDP was developed by the World Bank in collaboration with the UNHCR for the benefit of both refugees and host communities. At the same time, Kenya is dragging its feet on the development of Garissa Integrated Social and Economic Development Program (GISEDP) which would benefit host communities and Somali refugees living in Dadaab refugee camp. The Garissa Deputy County Commissioner interviewed on November 27, 2021 presented Kenya’s position on Somali refugees in Dadaab thus:

I can tell you that it is not practical to implement CRRF in Garissa. The priority here is to have the camp closed as opposed to finding ways of integrating refugees in the host community. Our primary concern here is insecurity. [. . .] [Y]ou are familiar with the many terrorist incidents that have come about because of these refugee camps so we can’t discuss anything about integration as if we are not aware of these threats. Everything here hinges on ensuring that the camps are closed so that our security as a country is assured.

Kenya thus exhibits policy contradictions in its attitudes and policies toward the predominantly Sudanese refugees in Kakuma and the mainly Somali refugees in Dadaab. Its humanitarian obligations are superseded by the security threat that it perceives to be epitomized by Somali refugees. It thus situates its refugee policy within the context of national interest, regional geopolitics, foreign policy, and bilateral relations with Somalia.

Informality as a Space of Possibilities and Local Solutions

The law and the formal processes within which the law is implemented are mediated by the extralegal social relations and politics that enable the actors involved to “operate outside the rules, to use rules, or abandon them, bend them, reinterpret them, side-step them, or replace them” (Moore 2000, 4). Although the nation-state in Africa has clearly demarcated borders that were imposed by colonial authorities, it faces the challenge of controlling its border regions and making its presence regularly felt by inhabitants of these regions (Aniche, Moyo, and Nshimbi 2021). Ethiopia and Kenya are no exception to this general state of affairs in Africa. This situation can be regarded as having negative ramifications for the nation-state and positive ones for refugees and even the host communities.

On the one hand, the state’s limited presence in border regions has security implications exemplified by transborder criminal activities such as human trafficking, smuggling of small arms, and transnational terrorist attacks (ibid.). On the other hand, the invisibility of state institutions in border regions or laxity in enforcement of border control measures provides a space within which informality thrives. The informality of this situation enables refugees to circumvent host countries’ stringent refugee policies by relying on social relationships with host communities that do not always conform to the official refugee policy.

The situation in Ethiopia and Kenya echoes earlier cases of informal integration along border regions exemplified by the experiences of Angolan refugees in Zambia (Hansen 1981), Mozambican refugees in eastern and northeastern Zimbabwe, and the Shona people who straddle the Mozambique-Zimbabwe border and who move back and forth across the border which they describe as “artificial” (Daimon 2016).

Informality makes it easier for refugees to integrate in defiance of the official refugee encampment policy because most of the border regions are occupied by co-ethnics who live on both sides of the border such that refugee camps are often established in areas that have a history of transborder kinship, marriage, religious, business, and even political relationships. In this respect, refugees are able to find solutions without official state approval and support, but through their own informal ties with the host communities living in the regions where the camps are located (Hansen 1981; Daimon 2016).

In contrast to the stereotypical, pathologizing, and essentialist depiction of African refugees, Somali refugees provide an example of how refugees possess the resourcefulness and social capital to rebuild lives disrupted by violent conflict and flight. There is a growing body of literature which shows how refugees use social capital and networks within their communities and with the host community to promote resilience and create economic opportunities among other objectives. ⁴ This happens in spite of refugee policies that are either against local integration, sluggish in implementation of integration or outrightly hostile to refugees. Although camps are designed to physically separate refugees from citizens of the host country and restrict refugees’ movement, this has not deterred the establishment of symbiotic relationships between the refugee and host communities, especially in cases of protracted displacement. Somali refugees have gained access to the key economic sectors that are important for their integration and coexistence with the host community including but not limited to informal access to land and markets, intermarriage, and participation in local level voluntary associations. In this respect, refugees’ self-initiative does not function in a social vacuum but in contexts characterized by the active involvement and cooperation of host communities.

In spite of the legal stalemate in terms of finding durable solutions, the Somali refugees in Ethiopia and Kenya have resorted to informal structures and channels as avenues toward sociocultural and economic integration. Although both Kenya and Ethiopia treat Somali refugees as security threats and have hitherto officially confined them to camps, there has been economic and sociocultural integration between the refugees and the host community even before Kenya and Ethiopia agreed to become CRRF pilot countries (Nigusie and Carver 2019; Carver, Gedi, and Naish 2020; Binkert et al. 2021). Ethnic similarity and a long period of interaction and exchange have contributed to positive relations between refugees and hosts in the Somali regions in both host countries (Vemuru, Sarkar, and Fitri Woodhouse 2020). With massive influxes of Somali refugees into Ethiopia and Kenya, the historical and cultural connections became a resource, which provides support structures for Somali refugees in their quest to rebuild their lives in the host countries.

Kenya’s reluctance to integrate Somali refugees does not necessarily mean that host communities in Garissa County, northeastern Kenya, where Dadaab refugee camp lies follow the government’s policy in their relations with the refugees. The latter have also defied this policy as illustrated by refugees who have self-settled in urban areas such as Nairobi, the country’s capital city, in spite of the Kenyan government’s position on Somalis in particular and refugees in general. According to members of the host community interviewed in Garissa County in late 2021, members of the host community initially saw refugees and the creation of Dadaab refugee camp as an economic and security threat and resented the fact that refugees received humanitarian assistance while they did not even though they were equally poor. They were also concerned about the refugees potentially transplanting insecurity from Somalia into Kenya.

Hali, a Somali refugee woman who lived in Nairobi, explained in an interview in 2006 that some Somali Kenyan men had killed her mother who lived in Dadaab over dyeing material. Somali refugees’ entrepreneurship at one point led to an arson attack in Mombasa allegedly by jealous Asian business people (Campbell 2005, 2006). The research in 2007 also revealed that some Kenyans resented refugees because of their capacity to pay exorbitant rentals in advance which had pushed rental prices beyond many locals’ capacity to pay.

However, relations improved as the war in Somalia dragged on and both the refugees and host community came to the realization that they were likely to live next to each other for the unforeseeable future. Interviews in 2006–7 with urban refugees in Nairobi who had lived in Kakuma and Dadaab refugee camps revealed that, over time, and with efforts by NGOs working in the camps to establish peaceful co-existence, relations improved, and mutual dependence grew. This was corroborated by research participants interviewed in 2021 who revealed that relations had significantly improved in recent years. The Garissa County Donor Relations Coordinator who was interviewed on December 3, 2021 stated, “They [refugees] are aliens who invaded our space but there is positivity because they have opened up business and brought new business ideas. They are creating jobs and so on.” Host community members who were interviewed categorically stated that they wanted Somali refugees to be integrated in Kenya in contrast to the government’s intention to forcibly repatriate them to Somalia. They also indicated that refugee and host community business people belonged to the same associations and that conflict between the two communities had subsided through mediation by religious leaders. Once the initial concerns of the refugees transplanting the conflict into Kenya had been allayed, the host community and refugees were able to focus on areas of mutual interest such as economic activities and shared language, culture, and religion. The personal assistant to the area member of parliament who was interviewed on November 29, 2021 referred to the national government as “the major challenge” and indicated his distance from the national government’s policy by presenting his position as follows:

Lack of mobility for refugees is the main challenge. The MP has introduced a motion in parliament that calls for full integration of refugees within the local community. He wants refugees to be allowed free movement. Refugees have been staying with locals for 30 years. They are living together and doing business together. There is no conflict between the two. As the host community, we are the biggest donors supporting refugees. We have given out land. The building materials are ours. Refugees are drinking our water and they are enjoying other benefits.

Not all the Somali refugees stayed in the camps as required by Kenya’s encampment policy. Before terrorist attacks became frequent, Kenya’s attitude toward refugees was described as “benign neglect” (Verdirame and Harrell-Bond 2005, 31) and it predominantly pursued a “somewhat laissez faire policy” (Verdirame 1999, 57). Many of them moved to urban areas such as Nairobi where they have transformed Eastleigh into a commercial hub. As Kenya insisted for decades that refugees reside in the camps, Somali refugees became important economic players outside the camp in Garissa County and also carved an economic niche for themselves in Nairobi where some of them relocated and self-settled. The informality in city governance thus provides a space of possibilities for the refugees and this has also been noted among refugees in Cairo, Egypt (Norman 2021). During visits by Rose Jaji to Eastleigh in 2007, Kenyans could be seen buying merchandise from Somali refugee business owners. It is interesting to note that as the government insisted that all refugees reside in camps and humanitarian organizations such as the UNHCR and its implementing partners directed aid to the camps in line with the encampment policy, Kenyan citizens leased their residential and commercial properties to refugees who opted out of the camps and self-settled in Nairobi and other cities. It is through these symbiotic refugee-host community relations that Somali refugees in Kenya have informally integrated into the host communities. A refugee opinion leader interviewed at Dadaab refugee camp on November 24, 2021 described host community-refugee relations thus, “Both locals and refugees are members of business groups like meat sellers’ associations. [. . .] We interact daily in terms of business, letting our children go to the same schools as locals, marriage, and other social functions.” A local youth leader in Garissa County similarly observed:

Integration has been happening in terms of marriage and business. We do business together with refugees. We now understand each other more with refugees. Refugees fled from Somalia and we hosted them. That’s what integration means. We have learned from each other different skills, for example, business enterprises. [. . .] Refugees and locals are integrated because we live in one area. Although we are in Bula and they are in the camp, we use the same market, we share similar businesses, same bus stage and the animal market is one. [. . .] Shop owners are organized into social groupings such as al Imran which is the name of one such social groupings. [. . .] We speak the same language and we help each other in solving whatever problem that might arise. We are brothers.

Informal initiatives to integrate refugees locally have likewise helped Somali refugees in Ethiopia to integrate in economic and sociocultural terms into the host communities. Somali refugees participate in commercial activities in local markets in the refugee-hosting areas. One of the refugee women interviewed in Sheder mentioned that refugee women also participate in the market as well as in informal saving schemes and associations that are used by local women in these areas. Members of host communities who participated in the research also pointed out that refugees are Somalis and they therefore feel culturally and morally obligated to support and help them. In an interview, the head of an INGO working with refugees in Jigjiga, Ethiopia, observed, “It is only the legal integration that has not taken place in the Somali region in Ethiopia, but refugees and host communities are informally integrated.” Such integration, as studies suggest, has been largely due to the ethnic similarities between refugees and hosts in the Somali region in Ethiopia as is the case in the northeastern region of Kenya (Fielden 2008; Abebe 2018; Nigusie and Carver 2019). The informal and local solutions found by the refugees and hosts in Ethiopia have facilitated refugees’ participation in the local economic sector and markets as both entrepreneurs and customers. Refugees are thus contributing to transformation of host areas into economic centers with new trade opportunities, remittances, and businesses that transcend host communities such as Kebribayah, Awbare, and Dollo Ado in Ethiopia (Betts et al. 2019; Graham and Miller 2021). A regional government official interviewed in Jigjiga in 2022 also stated that refugees informally move out of the camps to Jigjiga (the nearest town and major market) and engage in various businesses informally. These local solutions that are initiated by the refugees and host communities have been the lifeline of many Somali refugees in Ethiopia and they play a significant role in finding alternatives to Ethiopia’s strict encampment policy toward refugees.

Stories about flight or forced displacement are primarily stories about destruction and loss. However, flight also provides refugee women with resources they may not have had in their own countries especially where women are not allowed to seek employment and earn incomes. Interviews with Somali refugee women in Nairobi indicated that in Somalia, the women were not allowed to work outside the home for cultural and religious reasons. Living in Nairobi, a cosmopolitan city where women’s employment was considered normal, had facilitated Somali refugee women’s engagement in work outside the home even though they mostly worked in the informal sector due to Kenya’s requirement for work permits which the majority of the refugees cannot afford. Some of the Somali refugee women who took advantage of the environment in Nairobi to seek employment engaged in income-generating activities such as selling merchandise in Eastleigh. In focus group discussions with Somali women in Nairobi in 2007, most of them indicated that Kenya had taught them to earn their own incomes instead of waiting for men to provide for the family. Some of the women had lost their husbands to the war and had children to feed; in Nairobi, they had only themselves to depend on as humanitarian aid was directed to the camps in conformity to the encampment policy. A UNHCR official interviewed in 2006 stated that the refugee agency and its partner organizations operated on the assumption that refugees who chose to live outside the camps made this choice because they had the means to provide for themselves.

Instead of solely depending on humanitarian assistance and relocating to the camps in order to access such assistance, Somali refugees rely on internal resources such as community solidarity, which enables them to assist each other in times of need. They channel acts of solidarity through their shared religious affiliation to Islam. Hali, cited above, explained that members of her community were required to make financial contributions toward weddings and funerals among other life events.

Host community members in Ethiopia who were interviewed in late 2020 indicated that they supported refugees who wanted to engage in small businesses by selling merchandise to them at wholesale prices from Wajaale, the nearest major business town. In doing so, they assist refugees who cannot formally engage in such businesses. Moreover, refugees and the host community support each other in good and difficult times as illustrated by informal women’s associations locally known as Jamac. These associations support their members during bereavement, marriage, and other significant events in the community. Jamac serves as both an informal social support system in times of need for its members and an informal saving mechanism through Hagbad or Ayuuto, which enables its members to receive interest-free savings on a rotational basis. In these associations, every woman is identified as a member, not as a refugee or host. A woman from the host community in Ethiopia’s Somali region corroborated this by stating that refugees “participate in businesses and also in our Jamac and Hagbad schemes. We are both Somalis and Muslims – the same people.” The Deputy County Commissioner in Garissa, Kenya, simply referred to Somali refugees and the host community as “similar.”

Oftentimes, host communities are as poor if not worse than the refugees. This is the case, for instance, in the Somali region in Ethiopia and the northeastern region of Kenya where the host communities face, to some extent, worse access to basic services and living conditions than the refugees. While provision of humanitarian assistance to the refugees draws resentment from the host communities especially at the initial stages of refugee hosting, the shared material circumstances can also create mutual identification and facilitate mutual dependence. Hali explained that when she lived in Kakuma refugee camp, the local Turkana would sell firewood to refugees or barter it for part of the rations the refugees received as humanitarian aid.

In Kenya, refugees are not allowed to own local SIM cards presumably for security reasons and this excludes them from using mobile money, a situation which is detrimental to their business transactions as they also do not have accounts with local banks. An official from a civil society organization in Kenya revealed during an interview carried out in December 2021 that in such situations, locals offer to facilitate and expedite refugees’ digital transactions thus demonstrating how relations between refugees and host communities provide solutions to an economic problem created by the government’s exclusionary policy toward refugees.

Similarly, Somali refugees in Ethiopia sell food items from their rations to local traders for cash. This enables the refugees not only to make money but also to buy food items that are not included in the rations such as vegetables, rice, and spaghetti (Betts et al. 2019). The new refugee proclamation of 2019 in Ethiopia gives refugees access to irrigable land although the law has not been put into practice. However, refugee self-initiative and informal solutions are evident in the case of access to irrigable land where refugees have informal agreements with the host community that enable them to access agricultural land for cultivation in the Somali region (Binkert et al. 2021). This was confirmed during the interview with a member of the host community in Sheder who stated, “Of course, we share land with them and they cultivate. They are neighbors and we are the same people.”

In addition to economic relations, Somali refugees have also been able to integrate into Ethiopia and Kenya through social ties facilitated by intermarriage, which, for all the decades that Ethiopia and Kenya insisted on refugee encampment, turned out to be an indirect way of facilitating integration into the local community and transitioning from the refugee status to citizenship by marriage. Intermarriages between Somali refugees and host communities in the Somali region of Ethiopia and the northeastern region of Kenya have been practiced since the establishment of refugee camps in the two regions. This is due to the fact that in Somali culture, marriage is one of the institutions in which informal practices are more practical or feasible and therefore more prevalent. Most of these marriages are religious and/or traditional and therefore do not require registration.

In 2017, Ethiopia amended its 2012 vital events registration law. The new law permits refugees to register their vital events such as marriage, births, divorce, and deaths. Since then, refugees have been registering their vital events in the local areas where they occur. However, documentation was never a barrier in the first instance and ethnic and religious similarity between the refugee and host communities largely facilitated the intermarriages (Vemuru, Sarkar, and Fitri Woodhouse 2020).

Considering that the war in Somalia has scattered Somalis to all corners of the world, the protracted nature of this violent conflict has created Somali diaspora communities that invest in compatriots who remain in Somalia and those who fled to other countries in Africa. Family members resettled mainly in countries in the global North send remittances to relatives in Somalia (Lindley 2007) and in other host countries in Africa. Refugees who receive remittances use them to meet basic needs and also as start-up capital for entrepreneurial activities which facilitates integration for the transnationally dispersed Somali community (Hammond 2013). In Eastleigh, Somalis have their own money transfer facilities such as Dahabshiil, which enables them to invest in their own community instead of paying money transfer fees to global money transfer facilities such as Western Union. Thus, the longer the conflict in Somalia has dragged on, the more it has become clear to Somalis that they cannot continue to “wait” in camps with the hope that they will repatriate to their country. This has spurred them toward seeking solutions to their protracted situation in the host countries. Their economic activities have enabled them to find solutions that are of a more durable nature than the humanitarian assistance which has so far mainly focused on basic rights and needs such as shelter, food, health, and education. In the process of engaging in economic activities, Somali refugees have turned the logic of encampment, namely creation of a temporary space where refugees wait for repatriation, on its head. This is clear in how tarpaulin tents have been replaced by sturdier and long-term buildings thus transforming the refugee camps into a space of unintended permanence. It can be argued that it is in tacit acknowledgment of how protracted situations have revealed refugees’ resourcefulness that countries such as Kenya and Ethiopia embraced the CRRF as a strategy to harness refugees’ resources and ensure that their presence also benefits host communities.

The research in Garissa County in Kenya and the Somali region in Ethiopia revealed that some members of the host communities had registered as refugees in order to access food rations and other services including possibilities of resettlement that are provided to refugees in the camp. Conversely, refugees had registered as citizens of Kenya and Ethiopia in order to access the advantages of possessing a host country national identity card such as doing business, working in the formal sector, access to higher education, and traveling with ease. In this instance, both communities engaged in mutual encroachment of space in defiance of the logic of encampment namely separation of refugees from citizens.

When Kenya announced its intention to close Dadaab camp, one of the hurdles it faced was unintentional repatriation of its own citizens who had registered as refugees and leaving behind some of the refugees who now pass for citizens. In a region where refugees and the host community have built positive relations over the years, it is not surprising that this situation was allowed to happen within the local context of the camp-host community interface and the informality within which relationships between the two communities have thrived in the three decades that the refugee camps have existed in both host countries. Somali refugees’ self-registration as citizens of Kenya and Ethiopia illustrates how the informal can be part and parcel of the state’s formal processes thus providing refugees with the opportunity to find solutions through their own initiative and host community solidarity. Strategies of self-inclusion in defiance of exclusionary refugee policies are a form of resistance to host governments’ insistence that repatriation and third country resettlement are the most preferable solutions even when protracted situations such as the case of Somali refugees are evidence that these two durable solutions are not accessible to the majority of refugees.

Conclusion

The mediation of formality by informality provides insights into how policy is translated into practice or circumvented by action in the locations that host refugees. The circumstances of refugees are often evaluated within the framework of official refugee policies and host governments’ positions on durable solutions. This inevitably leads to assessment of whether there are any formal activities by host governments intended to provide solutions to refugees in protracted situations. In contrast to official refugee policy and the formal practices deriving from them, solutions need to be sought in informal structures and unofficial activities that occur at the initiative of the refugees themselves with the support of host communities. The case of Somali refugees in Ethiopia and Kenya illustrates that the lack of policy solutions is not necessarily an obstacle to refugee integration. This suggests the need to consider the role of social relationships, shared culture, language, religion as well as economic and political ties in facilitating refugees’ quest for solutions in the absence of host governments’ support. The situation of Somali refugees in Ethiopia and Kenya demonstrates the need to critique official refugee policies and formal structures which exclude and obscure informal processes on the ground that provide solutions to refugees.

Refugees in protracted situations strive to find solutions in defiance of the encampment regime but these solutions remain invisible because they are obscured by the fact that the countries that host the refugees do not officially pursue any of the three durable solutions. In this regard, it is important to depart from the idea that refugees are incapable of resisting unfavorable host government policies and study their self-initiative and resourcefulness. In doing so, it is also pertinent to consider the role of host communities especially where their relations contradict the stereotypical idea that they are hostile and resentful toward the refugees. In the case of Somali refugees in Kenya and Ethiopia, host communities tap into mutual identification, local traditions, and historical ties which generate solidarity and facilitate economic and social integration. The circumstances of Somali refugees in Ethiopia and Kenya demonstrate the role of informality in countervailing the detrimental impact of formality where the latter serves to confine refugees to a state of protracted limbo and uncertainty. The establishment of symbiotic relationships between host and refugee communities that facilitate the inclusion of refugees point to the need for a shift from looking at refugees through the lens of official government policies to studying local dynamics in the regions that host the refugees and their contribution toward finding solutions for refugees in protracted situations.

In view of these findings, we recommend policies that build on shared needs and interests between the refugees and host communities, established local structures and institutions, and the social dynamics in the regions that host the refugees. Integrating the established structures and local institutions that are recognized by both the refugees and the host communities into refugee policy has the potential to produce long-term outcomes that can be sustained even after the refugees have ceased to be a “humanitarian crisis.” Our second recommendation emphasizes integration of local initiatives into national refugee policies so that the refugees and host communities graduate from “target populations” to formal recognition as actors in finding solutions for refugees. Lastly, there is need for the UNHCR and its partner organizations to direct more resources to mutually identified needs and interests among the refugees and host communities, which was not the case in the camps that we studied.