Drought and economic refugees overburden capital

Djibouti city is being overburdened by the number of people arriving to seek work or fleeing drought, Ismail Tani, Djibouti’s chief of cabinet, told IRIN on Wednesday. He said the city’s infrastructure was designed to cater for about 200,000 people, but that this number had been “greatly surpassed” by a rural-urban drift inside the country, sparked by drought, and movement from neighbouring countries. According to the official, many of those coming in over Djibouti’s borders with Ethiopia and Somalia were economic refugees or pastoralists forced into moving by drought, and therefore not entitled to UNHCR assistance in their camps. “These people count as economic refugees, but many arrive in a hopeless state, and we cannot turn them away or move them on. Most are also nomadic and have no resources left,” Tani said. Police and military checks at the Djibouti borders had proved mainly “ineffective” in handling a problem which had been affecting Djibouti ever since it gained independence in 1977, he explained. Both the government and humanitarian agencies have warned that an influx into urban centres by local drought-affected pastoralists and foreign migrants has overburdened the health, water and social service systems. “There is a major problem of urban poverty in Djibouti and help is not at hand” a Djibouti journalist told IRIN. He said that since 2000 there had been a noticeable increase in street children, begging and prostitution on the streets of the port city. According to Ismail Tani, the situation was also causing security problems. “Some who come across the border are militia, or have been jailed in Ethiopia or Somalia.” He said Djibouti also served as a transit point for those migrating to the Arab states and the USA. The urban influx - which has been particularly high because of a prolonged regional drought - was impoverishing locals, the official said. People in neighbouring Ethiopia, Eritrea and Somalia displaced by drought or political tensions had come to seek work in the city as domestic workers, construction workers, or in the port itself. Migrant labourers have proved willing to take lower wages, which creates an unemployment problem for local Djiboutians. The World Food Programme (WFP) last week said an urban influx was part of an emergency of more than 95,000 drought-affected people in Djibouti, who were in need of assistance. Drought-affected migrants from neighbouring countries have joined a rural-urban drift to the capital, in which central regions of Djibouti have received less than 50 percent of the normal annual rainfall. It has hit nomadic populations hard, particularly women and children. Fatma Samoura, the WFP representative in Djibouti, said the emergency operation would intervene in urban centres with food-for-work programmes and would also try and stop the exodus from rural regions. She confirmed that that the city’s water, health and hygiene inrastructure was now overloaded as a result of the influx. Over the next seven months, more than 11,000 mt of supplies would be given, at the cost of US $6.5 million, a WFP statement said on 29 August.