Tuesday June 26, 2018
Qatar Charity (QC) has distributed dry food supplies to 1,000 Somali refugee families living in the Dadaab camp in Kenya to help them cope with the acute food shortage.
The distribution of food supplies was carried out at a cost of QR 200,000 through QC’s field office in the country in cooperation with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), which is responsible for managing these camps.
The relief was provided as part of a joint campaign launched by Qatar Charity and UNHCR last April to raise more than $9.6m to reach out to 100,000 people.
The campaign is aimed at helping Somali returnees and internally displaced persons (IDPs) and integrating them with receiving communities by rehabilitating the public infrastructure in the fields of health, education, shelter, water, and sanitation.
UNHCR and Qatar Charity seek to enable Somali returnees, internally displaced persons (IDPs) and receiving communities to have access to education; and reintegrate them through the establishment of a public infrastructure that will assist in rehabilitation and construction in order to promote peaceful coexistence and self-reliance.
Also, both parties seek to provide access to basic services in the areas of return; so that Somali returnees, displaced persons and receiving communities can achieve appropriate conditions of stability.
Qatar Charity has chosen Dadaab camp, one of the oldest refugee camps in the world, due to the need for food support, especially during the holy month of Ramadan. The relief project has targeted 1,000 refugee families in the camp, providing a food basket to each family. The basket includes rice, sugar, flour, oil and powdered milk.
The implementation of this project came at a time when refugees living in Dadaab camps faced a shortage of Ramadan food supplies, as most of them depend on food aid provided by humanitarian organizations, especially WFP.
Also, Qatar Charity is preparing to implement an educational project for the refugees living in the Kakuma Camp, the second largest camp in Kenya, in cooperation with UNHCR, Education Above All Foundation and a number of humanitarian organizations. The Dadaab camp was established in northeastern Kenya on the border with Somalia in 1991 when the civil war broke out in Somalia.