Fekadu Adugna is Project Coordinator at the Organization for Social Science Research in Eastern and Southern Africa and a member of the Protracted Displacement Economies (PDE) team.
Dollo Ado is a district in south-eastern Ethiopia bordering Somalia to the east and Kenya to the south. As of February 2022, Dollo Ado’s five refugee camps host 199,360 refugees from Somalia. The camps were established between 2008 and 2010 to host refugees displaced in southern Somalia due to armed conflict and recurrent drought. Southern Somalia has been suffering from a resurgence of armed conflict since 2008. The conflict is mainly between the Government of Somalia (supported by the African Union Mission in Somalia) and the extremist non-state group Al-Shabaab.
This blog post highlights the role that Somali refugees play in stimulating the farming economy in Dollo Ado. Contrary to the common assumption that refugees are passive recipients of aid and a burden to the ‘host’ community, Somali refugees in Dollo Ado are significantly contributing to the transformation of the local economy. This shows how much refugees can contribute to economic progress if provided with the right opportunities.
Refugees’ background and agricultural skills
Most of the refugees in Dollo Ado camps were displaced from the fertile agricultural areas of Juba and Shebele in southern Somalia, where the Rahanwein clan practice an agro-pastoral way of life. When they arrived in refugee camps in Dollo Ado, these refugees found themselves between two big rivers: Ganale and Dawa, which had never been utilized for irrigation. Ganale River is situated in around two to four kilometres away from each of the refugee camps (except Bokolmayo camp), and it is very suitable for irrigation.
The refugees have entered into arrangements with the ‘host’ communities to access land. Two of these arrangements are renting land and sharecropping. Refugees who have financial capacity rent land from the ‘host’ community, purchase water engines that pump water from the river to the farm, and initiate irrigation. Those who cannot afford to rent land use burjuwas – a sharecropping arrangement common in Somalia. Under this arrangement, the landowner contributes land and the landless contribute labour. The remaining agricultural inputs (such as seed, fertilizer and insecticide) are contributed by both parties.
The collaborations centre around onion farming, which was not previously undertaken in the region. From the outset, the refugees and their ‘host’ partners wanted to produce at a large scale and sell in local markets and beyond. Indeed, in 2019 and 2020, they sold their produce as far as northern Ethiopia. The successful ventures generated tens of thousands of birr. For example, Mohammed (all names in this article have been changed) is a 58-year-old refugee who lives in Buriamino camp with his two wives and 23 children. In 2018, he was among the first refugees to enter into a sharecropping arrangement with a ‘host’ family. Together they worked to irrigate two hectares of land. Mohammed earned 78,000 birr (US$1519) in the first harvest. He has continued to make a relatively reasonable amount of money since then.
The ‘host’ community are taken by surprise
This region, which had entirely depended on the purchase of vegetables (as well as cereals and fruits) from other regions of Ethiopia and neighbouring countries, has suddenly become a source of vegetables for different parts of the country. Before the agricultural initiatives described above, the clans inhabiting the region had engaged in pastoralism or hoe-based cultivation. They had never been involved in irrigation agriculture, and were taken by surprise when they realised that their land could be such a productive asset.
Kemal belongs to the lineage of the head of the Garimaro clan. He owns over 50 hectares of land, which traditionally had been used for grazing. In 2018, a refugee man asked to use a hectare of his land for onion farming. Kemal agreed and said the refugee man could cultivate as much as he could afford. The man cultivated around three hectares. He produced onions that fetched about 600,000 birr (US$11,684). Kemal said: “when I saw the land I gave him fetches that amount of money, I was taken by surprise, and now I am among the leading farmers. I purchased two water engines, and I am considering buying a car.”
“I have to learn”
Adan is another member of the ‘host’ community benefitting from the agricultural practices introduced by refugees. He is a 45-year-old resident of Buriamino, a small town next to a refugee camp. Adan served in the Ethiopian National Defence Force, and he was deployed to South Sudan as a member of the Ethiopian contingent of the United Nations Mission in South Sudan. Speaking about the impact of refugees on his life, Adan said:
“When they [refugees] produce onions and earn that amount of money… I said to myself, ‘I have to learn’. I cultivated a piece of land… I had a small amount of money from my stay in South Sudan which I used for seed, and other inputs. I produced onions and managed to harvest 350 quintals [a quintal is about 80 kg]. I sold a kg for 18 birr, so fetched over 500,000 birr in total, and bought a pickup car. The car is [popularly] known as the car bought by onions!”
Following these success stories, many people around the camps, including civil servants and workers of humanitarian agencies, have engaged in irrigation agriculture. Beyond the neighbouring ‘host’ communities, wealthy business people from Dollo Ado and elsewhere have begun to rent land and start cultivation. New knowledge and technology have been introduced to the region, which has suddenly made land an important asset, and attracted many new economic actors to the region.
This blog appeared originally in the PDE website PDE is a project funded by UK Research and Innovation through the Global Challenges Research Fund (grant reference number ES/T004509/1).
On Generosity, Sponsorship and the Right to Asylum
Dr. Aleksandra Lewicki, Senior Lecturer in Sociology & Co-Director of the Sussex European Institute A.Lewicki@sussex.ac.uk
On Monday, the British government introduced its new ‘Homes for Ukraine’ scheme which is presented as a ‘step up’ in Britain’s generosity towards refugees. However, the scheme is merely a continuation of Britain’s restrictive politics of asylum and immigration. Specifically, it draws on two key principles of recent immigration legislation – sponsorship and everyday bordering – which limit the rights of people who move to the UK and individualize responsibility for asylum.
Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, neighbouring countries such as Moldova, Poland, Slovakia, Romania, and even Hungary opened their borders and waived visa requirements to make escape routes more manageable. These and other European countries have since received 3 million people displaced by the war. As this number is expected to rise to 4 million, we are beginning to hear pleas for greater solidarity from Europe’s West – especially from small and socio-economically deprived countries such as Moldova.
While offering public reassurance that Britain is prepared to offer support, the UK Government’s approach has been particularly reticent. Initially the British government suspended its visa services in Ukraine and limited visa entitlements to relatives of Ukrainians already living in the UK. At this point, Home Office Minister Kevin Foster invited displaced Ukrainians via twitter to apply to Britain’s seasonal work scheme. Home Secretary Priti Patel highlighted that stringent security checks were necessary to stop Russian agents or terrorists smuggling themselves into the UK. Many displaced people reported difficulties with having their visa applications processed, and several hundred Ukrainians found themselves stuck in Calais awaiting a UK visa. Only 300 visas had been granted via the family scheme by March 7th (and 5500 by March 17th). Accused of misjudging its population’s solidarity, the government declared that biometric data could be provided upon arrival in the UK and launched a new sponsorship scheme. Titled ‘Homes for Ukraine’, the scheme is introduced as follows: ‘The UK is one of the most generous nations in the world and the British public are now being asked to go one step further and open their homes to those fleeing the war in Ukraine’. People in Britain can apply to receive £350 a month to offer free accommodation to a refugee from Ukraine. When applying, they have to name the beneficiaries, who then have to undergo ‘light touch security checks’. Within 24 hours, 100.000 people had applied to act as sponsors.
So, is the sponsorship scheme the most recent culmination of Britain’s generosity towards refugees? And is it a ‘step up’ in Britain’s immigration policy?
I suggest that it is neither. The most obvious point has been made numerous times – the scheme is exclusively available to Ukrainians, while safe routes to asylum have been severely restricted for people fleeing conflict and war elsewhere, such as Afghanistan or Syria. Ukrainians can assert their Whiteness as press coverage positions them as ‘of Europe’. At the same time, however, as one commentator put it, they are seen as only ‘relatively civilized, relatively European’. The figure of the ‘Eastern European’, as I argue in an article that is under review with the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, has been ambiguously racialized in the Western imagination. Accordingly, representatives of British government, as cited above, spontaneously imagined displaced Ukrainians as potential fruit pickers or security threats. These representations are not mere rhetoric, as I elaborate in the mentioned article, but have contributed to justifying restrictions to rights and mobilities within the emergent pre- and post-Brexit border regime.
Firstly, sponsorship is a key pillar of the restrictive post-Brexit immigration regime. The 2020 immigration law introduced novel requirements for labour migration to the UK – including sponsorship by a prospective employer, evidence of language skills and the meeting of a minimum salary threshold. The latter does not apply to visa applicants who come to work in shortage sectors, such as care or seasonal work. The idea of sponsorship renders workers dependent on their employers’ specific requirements and preferences at any given time – and makes them more disposable.
Rebranding the idea by extending it to private homes, the government has now introduced the rationale of sponsorship into the asylum system. This increases displaced people’s dependence on individual good will – but also their precarity and disposability. Having escaped the trauma of war, they are entirely reliant on their sponsor’s mood or even financial need to host them in their private space. This reliance significantly reduces their autonomy in extremely challenging personal circumstances. Sexualized representations of ‘Eastern European’ women, moreover, may invite transgressions and exploitations for domestic, care or sex work.
The sponsorship scheme, secondly, reinforces another key principle of Britain’s immigration policy – the individualisation of responsibility for the management of Britain’s borders. Immigration laws that introduced the so called ‘hostile environment’ from 2014 onwards require landlords, health care practitioners, educators or employers to ascertain a person’s legal right to be in the UK. The governments ‘Prevent’ agenda has put front-line staff and ordinary citizens in charge of preventing political radicalisation. Effectively, the responsibility to detect illegalized border crossers, and prevent terrorist attacks, has thereby been attributed to individual members of society. In a similar move, the sponsorship scheme individualises the state’s public responsibility to offer asylum and puts the onus on individual citizens to deliver Britain’s international legal obligations. The appeal to individual generosity, even if it practically extends the number of people who can receive sanctuary in this instance, further erodes the human right to asylum.
The British public should be lauded for its welcoming attitude towards Ukrainians displaced by war. This solidarity, unfortunately, has been hijacked by a government that has no intention to meet its international human rights obligations. Countries in Europe’s East, in turn, should be lauded for waiving visa requirements – but also reminded that the right to asylum is universal and carries the same obligations towards globally displaced people.
These preliminaries settled, he did not care to put off any longer the execution of his design, urged on to it by the thought of all the world was losing by his delay, seeing what wrongs he intended to right, grievances to redress, injustices to repair, abuses to remove, and duties to discharge.
Posted in Migration Comments