Mama Aisha Mohamed sits quietly outside her makeshift shelter in Ifo camp, one of five sprawling settlements in the Dadaab refugee complex. She’s not counting profit, but tallying debt.
“I started a small kiosk to sell sugar and tea leaves,” she says. “Now I owe 19,000 shillings to suppliers. My business collapsed when people stopped buying—because they, too, had nothing.”
Across Dadaab, home to more than 450,000 refugees, economic life is unraveling. Earlier this year, the World Food Programme (WFP) was forced to cut food rations due to global funding shortfalls.
The result has been devastating, particularly for women who turned to small-scale businesses to feed their families.
Mama Aisha is among hundreds of women who took out informal loans—from neighbours, traders, and rotating savings groups—hoping their modest enterprises could sustain them through hard times. But with rising inflation and collapsing purchasing power, most of those ventures have failed.
“We used to get monthly rations,” says Fatuma Aden, a mother of six and chairperson of a women’s savings group in Ifo.
“Now, we borrow to eat. We borrow to survive.”
As debt deepens and hope fades, women are calling for more than emergency food relief. They want support to restructure their debts and rebuild their lives.
“We want more than survival,” says Mama Aisha. “We’re ready to work, to rebuild. But right now, we’re drowning without a way out.”
The WFP now provides just a fraction of previous food allocations, forcing families to lean heavily on overstretched community safety nets.
Essentials like flour, cooking oil, and lentils have become unaffordable. The once-fragile informal economy inside the camps is collapsing.
“Women are shouldering the brunt,” says Noor Fahat, a community mobiliser and refugee advocate.
“They took initiative, tried to build livelihoods—but now they face harassment from lenders and shame from neighbours. Some have even pulled their children out of school to save money.”
The Dadaab camps were established in the early 1990s and host mostly Somali nationals who fled decades of war and drought.
Many have lived here their entire lives, in legal limbo and with limited access to employment or resettlement.
For women, entrepreneurship was not just a means of survival—it was a rare source of dignity and agency.That hard-earned progress is now slipping away.
Aid agencies warn of a worsening humanitarian emergency.
“The funding gap is forcing us to make impossible choices,” a WFP official told The Kulan Post on condition of anonymity.
“We are prioritising the most vulnerable, but the needs are overwhelming. People are hungry.”
In the shelters of Ifo, Dagahaley, and Hagadera, the daily conversations among women no longer revolve around ambition or opportunity, but survival.
How to repay a loan. How to stretch a kilo of maize. How to explain to a child there’s nothing to eat.
“We have nothing left to lose,” says Fatuma. “Even hope is becoming too expensive.”
