DADAAB (Kenya): One lives in a mud-and-stick hut with her family in arid east Kenya. The other has a bathroom of roughly the same size in Brussels. The young Ethiopian refugee may not have a lot in common with the executive of a software firm, but she hopes the latter will help her to get an education.
“We don’t have enough books. We have to share one textbook for the whole class,” 13-year-old Jerusalem Alem shyly tells some of the world’s top executives as they visit her makeshift classroom in remote savannah.
“We need more teachers, desks and classrooms.”
In a drive to raise funds, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) took powerful businessmen and women to refugee camps in Kenya, Tanzania and Burundi earlier this month. Hundreds of thousands of people scratch a living in the camps after fleeing war and chaos in their countries.
Without a flow of donations, the Geneva-based refugee body has to approach UN member countries for money every year to carry out its operations.
But the agency is finding it hard to raise cash as demand for aid for other humanitarian crises rises. This year, UNHCR got $800 million in pledges but has a budget of $1.4 billion.
“Our donors continue to be generous but we are finding it more difficult to meet the need,” deputy high commissioner Wendy Chamberlin told Reuters at Dadaab, where most of the 140,000 refugees in three camps are Somali.
“That has put us in a funding crunch in 2006 and we anticipate it to go to 2007.”
The visitors included managers from a software giant, a pharmaceutical firm, an auditing firm and a sporting goods company.
At Dadaab, the first leg of their tour, they saw dusty hospital rooms where mothers give birth on a rusty bed covered by an old tarpaulin.
“Shocking is the only way to describe (the living conditions in the camps),” said Jeffrey Sturchio, vice-president of the pharmaceutical firm for external relations for the Middle East and Africa.
The executives belong to the Council of Business Leaders for UNHCR, a fundraising body launched at the World Economic Forum in January 2005.
The sporting goods company has already donated $430,000 for a pilot project in Dadaab’s camps, supporting education for girls.
At the Midnimo Primary School, children sit at rickety desks surrounded by walls of flattened cooking oil cans.
The sporting goods company has also facilitated the construction of more classrooms and paid for scores of teachers, who before averaged one for about 95 pupils.
Inside a dusty tin-walled classroom, the visitors sit on wooden desks, listening to the children’s stories.
Abdikadir Noor Farah, 18, talks of having to care for his mentally ill brother since they fled fighting in Somalia.
Many say they go to school hungry. All have ambitions.
“I am a geography student but you can see my surroundings. I can’t get to see other parts of the world,” said Paul Parach Majak, a 21-year-old pupil in grade seven, usually a class for 13-year-olds. “How can you help me do that?”
A reply comes from the software firm’s chief executive for the Middle East and Africa, who promises to look into helping out with software for the school.
The executives say they want to help.
The Kenyan government maintains a strict encampment policy, which restricts refugees to camps in desolate corners of the country where temperatures can rise to 45 degrees Celsius.
This means the refugees cannot engage in economic activity and computer access remains a dream for children like Majak.
