Qualla: Dadaab

Dadaab: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit globalhealthcsis, CC BY 2.0. It was supposed to last a few months. In 1992, aid workers laid out the first camps near a small market town in the thornbush of northeastern Kenya, expecting to shelter people fleeing Somalia's collapse until the fighting stopped. The fighting did not stop. More than three decades later, Dadaab is still here, and so are the families who arrived with nothing and built lives in a place that was never meant to hold them. By the spring of 2025, the complex registered more than 432,000 refugees and asylum seekers, making it one of the largest such settlements in the world. Behind that number are people who have raised children, buried parents, and grown old waiting to go home.

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Image: globalhealthcsis | CC BY 2.0

Dadaab: A City That Was Never Planned

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit globalhealthcsis, CC BY 2.0. Dadaab grew the way few cities ever do: not by design, but by necessity. The original camps of Dagahaley, Hagadera, and Ifo were built in 1992 for roughly 90,000 people. When drought and famine struck the Horn of Africa in 2011, more than 160,000 new arrivals walked in over a mat...

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Image: globalhealthcsis | CC BY 2.0

Dadaab: The People of Dadaab

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Oxfam East Africa, CC BY 2.0. The vast majority of residents are Somali, roughly 97 percent in recent years, most having fled the civil war and the droughts that followed it. Four in five are women and children. Before the camps existed, this land belonged to nomadic herders who moved their camels and goats a...

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Image: Oxfam East Africa | CC BY 2.0

Dadaab: Classrooms in the Thornbush

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Oxfam East Africa, CC BY 2.0. Education is the quiet engine of Dadaab. By 2024, the camp schools served more than 70,000 students, taught in buildings of stone and overflow classrooms made of long white tents. Scholarships reward the brightest, sending a handful on to universities far beyond the camp's fences...

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Image: Oxfam East Africa | CC BY 2.0

Dadaab: Living in Limbo

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Oxfam East Africa, CC BY 2.0. Life in Dadaab is shaped by impermanence. The Kenyan government has threatened more than once to close the camps, citing security concerns, and each threat sends a current of anxiety through a population with nowhere certain to go. Some families have chosen to return to Somalia u...

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Image: Oxfam East Africa | CC BY 2.0