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Melkadida refugee camp © Raphael Bradenbrink
Melkadida refugee camp

Report cover showing a view over Melkadida refugee campWe are delighted to announce the publication of a Somali-language version of the report 'Refugee Economies in Dollo Ado', written by Alexander Betts, Raphael Bradenbrink, Jonathan Greenland, Naohiko Omata and Olivier Sterck of the Refugee Economies Programme.

The aim is to make our research accessible to the refugee and host communities with whom we work. In order to do that, the Refugee Economies team decided to pilot translation in Dollo Ado, where both refugees and the host community have a shared, common language.

Alexander Betts explained "Until now, the main audiences for our reports have been academics, international organisations, NGOs, governments, and business. We wanted to broaden that to include refugees and host communities themselves. The communities play a key role in our research design and data collection. The next logical step is to ensure that we disseminate the research to those communities in a way that enables them to critically engage with the work and use it for their own purposes, such as informing their economic decision-making. For example, we wanted refugee-run businesses to have access to the kind of information that entrepreneurs around the world often take for granted -- data about the local economic landscape that can highlight untapped opportunities". 

The report will be launched in all five of the Dollo Ado refugee camps, and copies shared with refugee and host communities members at a series of outreach events organised with the Refugee Central Committees of the camps. The aim is to document and learn from the experience of those launch events. The translation was done by Maimuna Mohamud, a PhD student at Cambridge University. 

The report examines the economic strategies of Somali refugees in the cross-border economy of the region. The five Dollo Ado refugee camps host around 220,000 almost exclusively Somali refugees within a semi-arid and isolated border district within which refugees outnumber the host population. The camps and host community have benefited significantly from the IKEA Foundation’s €75m investment in the camps over a seven-year period.

Read and download the report ‘Nolosha Dhaqaale ee Qaxootiga ku Nool Dollo Ado’ here (6.7 MB pdf).