admin November 6th, 2009
The United Nations is warning that up to 750,000 people in Kenya, nearly half of them Somali refugees, could be caught up in flooding and landslides from heavy rains expected to peak in November.
The people most at risk are the 300,000 mainly Somali refugees in the Kakuma and Dadaab camps. Kakuma is in northwestern Kenya and Dadaab in the east on the border with Somalia. The overcrowded Dadaab complex of three camps was built to hold some 90,000 people but its population has swollen to three times that, in the process becoming home to more refugees than any other site in the world, according to the UNHCR.
U.N. aid agencies have activated contingency plans, bringing food, water treatment chemicals and mosquito nets to flood-prone areas. The flooding, which follows on from a period of drought, is also bringing disease in its wake – the WHO is reporting that cholera has already infected 10,000 people this year in Kenya.
Elsewhere in Kenya, hundreds of people have been evacuated from their homes in the central part of the country after mudslides, brought on by the heavy rain, destroyed houses.
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