Zambia, home to some of Africa’s oldest refugee settlements, is working on a groundbreaking plan to integrate some refugees into local communities and grant them greater freedom of movement.
This impoverished southern African country shelters about 300 000 refugees — some of whom arrived in Zambia in 1966 after fleeing at the early stages of neighbouring Angola’s liberation war.
”Since then, many refugee children have been born on its soil, many speak the local language and have picked up local cultural habits,” said Kelvin Shimo of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).
This has prompted the Zambian government and the UNHCR to come up with a joint project dubbed ‘Zambia Initiative,’ under which refugees are expected to be integrated into the local population to assist in developing the host communities.
”Among its many aims, the initiative seeks to change the perception that refugees are a burden to their host communities,” said a Zambian government official in charge of refugees.
Zambian President, Levy Mwanawasa, has said his country had nearly run out of resources to host refugees.
”The continued support to refugees by the Zambian government has also impacted negatively on the living conditions of host local communities, which are often worse off than those of the refugees,” Mwanawasa said.
The ‘Zambia Initiative’ was primarily planned to address inequalities between the refugees and the local population, which in most cases depend on infrastructure like schools that were built for refugees.
”Our agenda is to bring harmony between refugees and our people in the villages,” said a spokesman for the refugee commission in Zambia.
The initiative, which is expected to cost $5-million during its initial stage, will first be implemented as a pilot project in western Zambia where about 150 000 Angolans are living.
Zambia shelters about 210 000 Angolan refugees, more than any other country. Others are from the war-ravaged Democratic Republic of Congo, Burundi, Rwanda, Somalia and Ethiopia.
Some refugees do not intend to return home after living in Zambia for more than two decades.
”The Zambia Initiative has the advantage of addressing both issues of durable solutions for refugees and burden-sharing with their host communities,” read a report on the proposed project.
Under Zambian law, refugees must live in designated camps and their movements are restricted. Most refugees have complained that this regulation is too restrictive.
But now the Zambian government wants to relax the law when dealing with refugees who have stayed in the country for many years.
”Refugees are expected to be agents of development by
contributing to the local economy,” Shimo said.
”For instance, many refugees in Zambia have been allocated enough land to enable them produce export quantities of sweet potatoes, thus bringing much-needed foreign currency into the country,” he said.
The first phase of the project, which has attracted many donors, would involve the development of infrastructure in Zambian villages where the refugees would be hosted.
”Donors are now expected to provide small grants quickly to jump-start the initiative, allowing some of the projects to start as early as this year,” the UNHCR said in a report.
Top priority will go towards the development of agriculture by supporting small-scale farmers, building schools to boost education and providing adequate health care.
Zambia has two main refugee settlements and two major camps where asylum seekers are given a portion of land to grow their own food.
Maheba settlement, in North-Western Province, is one of the oldest in Africa with a population of 45 000 refugees. -Sapa-AFP