POUL DUE JENSEN FOUNDATION WATER Did you know? Nyarugusu hosts almost as many people as the total number of refugees entering the entire European Union in the peak year 2015 infrastructure where they put up the tents, so there was a crisis to establish water supply, roads, tents, schools, sanitation facilities, and clinics in what became the Burundi Sub area of the Nyarugusu Camp,” Will Furlong explains. When a crisis is declared by UNHCR, funding starts coming in from the donors. Then, UNHCR brings in aid agencies like Oxfam or Doctors Without Borders, to run the facilities in the camp. When the crisis is declared over, international funding levels drop, but the refugees don’t necessarily leave. Safe to go home? Burundi and Tanzania have both declared the Burundi crisis over, so they are encouraging the Burundian refugees to go home. From 2017 to 2018, about 30,000 have returned voluntarily, but there are still around 200,000 Burundians living in Tanzanian refugee camps. “It may be safe now, but the political and ethnic violence has happened before. When it breaks out, you have people breaking through the door of your home and attacking you with machetes.” “In Burundi, it’s a subsistence lifestyle: every day you must get up and figure out how to get by. In the camp, you have more than you’d have at home. Me, I can’t imagine living here, but in comparison to that, the camp is the best offer you have.” You have to consider people outside the camp To add further complexity to the situation, the life awaiting Burundians who choose to return to their country might not be so very different from the life of people living in the local communities right outside the refugee camps in Western Tanzania. Will reminds us that refugee camps encompass huge pieces of land. All around them, smaller host communities are scattered around like Zeze and Kasanda, each with a population of around 5,000. Inside the camp, you find all sorts of provisions that the host communities don’t necessarily have access to. Locals must work and scrounge for food, while refugees get it for free: “Imagine you are a Tanzanian, living in a community along the main access road, two kilometres from Nyarugusu. Every day, you see these agency vehicles, three or more Water Mission trucks, huge trucks loaded Will Furlong and the local district Commissioner inaugurate the Kasanda Community water system in April 2018. Photo: Water Mission Will Furlong understands the reluctance to leave the relative safety of the camp. Two thirds of the inhabitants are women and children, and what mother would not try to offer her children the best possible opportunities? with food and millions of dollars of aid literally driving through their community to get into the refugee camp and little or nothing coming to them.” Nyarugusu 2.0: Safe water to the host communities According to Will, reaching out to the host communities is a logical next step, when the distribution of resources between the camp and the surrounding communities is so obviously unfair: “In November 2017, the Tanzanian government said: ‘That’s not right’. They didn’t say: ‘We’re going to take part of the aid’, they said: ‘It’s not right. You’re going to have to consider the people outside the camp’. It started about a year ago. And the general response was: ‘They’ve got a point’.” Water Mission brought up the concerns of the Tanzanian government with the Foundation in 2017, and the immediate response was a USD 940,000 grant to provide solar-powered safe water in as many host communities as possible, and a long-term strategy to reach out to all host communities in the Western Tanzania Region needing sustainable access to safe water. 13
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