Nansen Refugee Award winner brings knowledge and hope to displaced Somalis

This blog has been reposted from UNHCR The UN Refugee Agency

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GALKAYO, Somalia, September 18 (UNHCR) – When Hawa Aden Mohamed was a young girl, her father made a decision that would change her life – and through her, transform the lives of thousands of Somali girls. He sent her to school.

Hawa Aden Mohamed went on to earn two university degrees before launching an ambitious programme to educate and empower Somali women and girls, many of them displaced by conflict or famine. Today, UNHCR announced that she has won the 2012 Nansen Refugee Award, which honours extraordinary service to those who flee war or persecution.

"Without education, you are unaware of so many things," Hawa Aden Mohamed said in a recent interview in the town of Galkayo, some 600 kilometres north of the Somali capital, Mogadishu. "Without education, you do not exist much – physically yes, but mentally and emotionally, you do not exist."

Once a refugee herself, Hawa Aden Mohamed returned to her homeland in 1995 and discovered her calling. As co-founder of the Galkayo Education Centre for Peace and Development (GECPD), she has helped restore hope and opportunity to local residents as well as those seeking refuge from the nation's long-running conflict and recurring droughts.

The centre offers free schooling to girls as well as literacy and awareness classes for women, tailoring courses, vocational training for boys, and food and other relief items to the displaced. Since it opened in 1999, the number of girls receiving education in the Mudug district has risen from 7 per cent to 40 per cent, the highest in the country, according to the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF).

GECPD encourages women and girls to see themselves as full members of society who possess fundamental human rights. And it openly addresses the complex issues of female genital mutilation, puberty, early marriage, rape and HIV/AIDS.

Local residents were initially wary of Hawa Aden Mohamed's aims. "The mosques spoke of us, said we were devils … but we just kept quiet," she said. "It calmed down, when they saw how many, almost 250 women, were taking classes in adult education. We had built around 12 schools."

Won over by the centre's success, the people of Galkayo now call her Eedo (aunt) or Mama Hawa. "We always say there is hope, we should not lose our hope, our torch of life," she said. "We say this, but in reality it's very difficult, especially for women and children."

Born in the town of Baidoa in 1949, Mama Hawa lost a sister, Fatouma, who was circumcised around age seven and died soon afterwards from an infection. Their aunt, who organized the circumcision, did not know any better, she said. "The word 'why' was not there."

Mama Hawa continued her schooling in Mogadishu and then spent eight years in India, earning degrees in nutrition and child development. She returned home to work for Somalia's Ministry of Education, where she headed the department of women's education, and later opened a clothing business with one of her sisters.

When the military dictator Siad Barre was overthrown in 1991, she fled to Kismayo, Somalia's southern port city, and then to Kenya. She moved to Canada through a family reunification programme, but her heart was in Somalia.

Returning to her homeland in 1995, she set up a women's education centre in Kismayo. She fled a few years later when rival militia turned the town into a battleground. "I even came without my glasses," she recalled. "I left them behind, everything left behind."

She came back from exile a second time in 1999 and settled in Galkayo, as her husband was working at a nearby research institute.

In recent years GECPD has begun working with boys, too. It offers carpentry and welding classes as well as a recreational space to help keep young boys off the streets and prevent them from falling into the clutches of pirates or armed groups.

Amid a slight improvement in the political situation, Mama Hawa and her team are teaching girls about the new constitution, so that they will know their rights.

"Education never finishes," she said. "Every day you will see something new. Myself, I am not well educated. I cannot say everything. Education is always a continuous learning process. Education is everything."

By Clar Ni Chonghaile in Galkayo, Somalia

New UN report shows record 800,000 people became refugees in 2011

This entry is reposted from the UN news center. Photo:UNHCR/B.Bannon

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UNHCR set up the first camps in the Dadaab complex in 1991 to host up to 90,000 people. Today they host more than 463,000 refugees.

18 June 2012 – Ahead of World Refugee Day, the United Nations refugee agency reported today that a record 800,000 people were forced to flee across borders last year, more than at any time since 2000.

The new refugees are part of a total of 4.3 million people who were newly displaced last year, owing to a string of major humanitarian crises that began in late 2010 in Côte d'Ivoire, and followed by others in Libya, Somalia, Sudan and elsewhere, according to Global Trends 2011, issued by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

“2011 saw suffering on an epic scale. For so many lives to have been thrown into turmoil over so short a space of time means enormous personal cost for all who were affected,” said the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, António Guterres, in a news release.

“We can be grateful only that the international system for protecting such people held firm for the most part and that borders stayed open. These are testing times,” he added.

Some 42.5 million people ended 2011 either as refugees (15.2 million), internally displaced (26.4 million) or in the process of seeking asylum (895,000), according to the report, which is UNHCR’s main publication on the state of forced displacement.

At the same time, 2011 saw some 3.2 million internally displaced persons (IDPs) return home – the highest rate of returns of IDPs in more than a decade.

Among the “worrying” trends noted in the report, UNHCR said that forced displacement is affecting larger numbers of people globally, with the annual level exceeding 42 million people for each of the last five years.

Another is that a person who becomes a refugee is likely to remain as one for many years – often stuck in a camp or living precariously in an urban location. Of the 10.4 million refugees under UNHCR’s mandate, almost three quarters (7.1 million) have been in exile for at least five years while awaiting a solution.

Overall, Afghanistan remains the biggest producer of refugees (2.7 million), followed by Iraq (1.4 million), Somalia (1.1 million), Sudan (500,000) and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (491,000).

Among industrialized countries, Germany ranks as the largest hosting country with 571,700 refugees. South Africa, meanwhile, was the largest recipient of individual asylum applications (107,000), a status it has held for the past four years.

While UNHCR’s original mandate was to help refugees, its work over the past six decades has grown to include helping many of the world’s IDPs and those who are stateless – those lacking recognized citizenship and the human rights that accompany this.

The report notes that only 64 governments provided data on stateless people, meaning that UNHCR was able to capture numbers for only around a quarter of the estimated 12 million stateless people worldwide.

World Refugee Day falls on Wednesday, 20 June. The theme for this year’s observance is “Refugees have no choice. You do.” and focuses on the tough choices facing refugees, helping the public to empathize with, and understand, their dilemma.