The Joint Assessment Mission in Refugee Camps

For the past week and a half, I've been on the protection team of the Joint Assessment Mission (JAM) that is being conducted by WFP, UNHCR and other UN agencies and partners to assess the food and non-food needs of refugees throughout Rwanda.

We've travelled thus far to 3 of the 6 refugee camps, and I've just returned to Kigali. There is a core group of about 15 of us going to all of the camps, and then partners within the camps are meeting us to also be a part of the process. We break up into thematic groups (nutrition, coordination, protection, WASH, etc.) and conduct focus groups and key informant interviews for two days at each camp.

As part of the protection group, we've been speaking with youth, elderly people, disabled people, and adult non-disabled men and women. We ask questions about who controls the money and food, if conflicts arise in the household around decision-making, who supports disabled people, whether there are any protection issues around shelter, and who the most vulnerable people in their community are.

The trip has been incredibly intense, both because of the amount of travel and also because the days have been full of focus groups which require intense concentration on emotionally-difficult topics.

Two of the camps we've visited so far have been Congolese, and in one, people have been living there for 20 years. The third camp was Burundian and newer, with people only having been there for 2 years. In all cases, some of the refugees were children who were born in the camps (but they still get refugee status and grow up feeling they don't belong in either Rwanda or the country their parents come from).

WFP supplies food in some camps and cash in others, a program they are working to expand to the rest of the camps. The money is supposed to be enough to cover everyone's food needs, but given increasing market prices and a need to spend money on non-food items, everyone says it isn't enough to get by. Those who can find small jobs or have relatives who can send remittances can get by, but those without supplemental sources of income say they only eat one meal a day. Children are noticeably malnourished and stunted.

The biggest problem seems to be a lack of land. Most of the refugees were subsistence farmers back home, and they would be able to support themselves if they had land to farm. However, given the density of Rwanda and the placement of the refugee camps, there simply isn't available land. This creates a system of dependency that seems nearly impossible to break. After 20 years in camps (in the case of some), people are still not self-sufficient. The situation doesn't seem to be improving anytime soon, either. As the DRC still isn't safe enough to go back, people simply hold out hopes of being resettled in the U.S. Before Trump, some people were in fact resettled from the camps each year. Now, no one is being resettled before the Supreme Court hears the travel ban case. In the meantime, the camp is getting more and more crowded.

Perhaps the biggest pity of all is thinking of how much fertile land people left behind in the DRC, along with everything in else in their lives, in exchange only for security.dd