Hotbeds of innovation
A new system leads displaced communities to self-reliance
Do you remember the last time you went camping? The feel of grit, the smell of campfire smoke and the aches in your hips and back from sleeping on a thin pad probably got old after the second day. Maybe you didn’t have the right gear and felt like you were going to freeze the first night.
Now imagine you can’t leave the campgrounds. Imagine you’re there because you’ve fled from tangible danger. Maybe it was a militant group gaining new territory. Imagine making the hardest decision of your life: to leave nearly all of your worldly possessions, your neighbors and life as you knew it behind for the uncertainty of crossing a border to come to this campground indefinitely. You are a refugee. You are displaced.
I recently returned to Houston from Uganda where I met with people who had to make that decision. These refugees now lead organizations working in the Bidi Bidi and Nakivale refugee settlements. I talked to Noella Kabala, who was a lawyer before fleeing her home in the Democratic Republic of Congo and who now employs other refugees in a sewing enterprise. Over time, she and other refugee entrepreneurs have changed the way I think about helping refugees.
I co-founded Every Shelter out of work that started for me as a graduate student at Rice University in 2012. We started with the simple goal of providing better housing solutions for refugees. It has taken me years to throw out many of the assumptions I had about what I could do to help. You may also have some preconceived notions about your life ahead as a refugee. Let me take a moment to dispel a few myths you may unknowingly hold because the sooner we enable refugees themselves to participate in solutions in camps the better.
Myth 1: Duration
Many of us think that being a refugee is a temporary condition. The reality is that people in “pro
tracted refugee situations” are forcibly displaced for an average of over two decades. My now 4-year-old daughter could finish high school, a college degree and even a doctorate by the time the average person who is displaced today will return home or be resettled.
Myth 2: Resettlement
When we think about refugees, we think about resettlement, the legal mechanism to grant lawful admission to refugees from another country. The reality is that less than 1 percent of refugees will ever be resettled and 9 in 10 of those will live in developing countries with struggling economies. Most will cross a border and remain in their neighboring country for over two decades.
Myth 3: Size
In the past year, Americans have been keenly aware of two events that caused massive forcible displacement — the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. For the first time since the Syrian conflict began more than a decade ago, it seems, refugees are on many of our minds. The reality is today, there are over 100 million forcibly displaced people, many forced to flee from conflicts and crises that never break into our news cycle. The World Bank predicts this number will increase by at least 143 million by 2050.
More than a design problem
Of course, there’s only so far imagining yourself as a refugee can take you. I was an architecture graduate student when these myths burst for me, and that was only the first step. I became aware that the vast majority of these refugees who found themselves in camps and settlements in barren fields around the world received only a few things to make a home for themselves; some form of structure (bamboo in Bangladesh, eucalyptus poles in Uganda, thin welded steel in the Middle East) with a lousy tarp stretched over it, and a dirt floor.
Naively, my collaborators and I believed this was a design problem.
Families needed a floor. So we set about to solve one obvious problem — families living in the dirt for decades. We followed the “typical” innovation pathway: we learned, we listened, we made prototype after prototype. We also secured some funding from the Laura and John Arnold Foundation (now Arnold Ventures) to begin running small batches of floor panels, and finally, we caught the attention of the IKEA Foundation, which invited us to Sweden to test our floor with a new shelter they were designing. We ultimately landed a grant from the United States Agency for International Development. We worked with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Lebanon for three years to test our floors with 34 families along the border with Syria in the Hezbollah-controlled Bekaa Valley.
Though we thought this was the pinnacle of our endeavor to do right by these families, this is where the real learning started.
Refugees don’t live in inadequate shelters because of product design failures. They do so because of system design failures. Every system is perfectly designed for the outcomes it produces. Refugees live in shoddy tents for years because of a broken and outdated refugee resettlement system.
Host countries typically ban refugees from building permanent shelters. Even after we received government approval for our flooring solution, some recipients’ homes were demolished.
A Cold War relic
The “current system” brings short-term solutions to decadeslong problems. When the UNHCR formed in 1950, it was an extension of the West’s postWorld War II, Cold War strategy. Originally granted a threeyear mandate with little funds, it was chiefly a resettlement agency happily resettling discontent defectors from Soviet-sympathizing countries to other countries in Europe and to the United States. Over the decades, the context changed dramatically, but the system aiding refugees didn’t keep pace. As it stands, it is ill-equipped to deal with refugees living in camps for decades.
Take the humble tarpaulin. This ubiquitous tarp, an innovation of the early 1970s, is made in Pakistan, India or China. It is then shipped around the world to distribution centers and regional warehouses, where it will ultimately be trucked through developing countries struggling for employment opportunities. The tarp you may buy at a big-box home improvement store is nearly identical to the tarps millions of refugees will receive to use as roofs and walls. Within three to six months, that tarp will begin to shred to pieces.
Uganda, where my organization’s operational base is, has hosted refugees since the 1940s. It is currently third in the world in the number of refugees it hosts — 1.5 million. Despite nearly eight decades of hosting refugees, no one has invested in producing tarps here. No one has seen the golden opportunity of solving two problems at once: the need for high-quality goods for shelters and the need for meaningful local employment.
Until now, that is.
For refugees, by refugees
In my nearly 10 years of working with refugees in and out of camps, I have learned the most from observing how refugees have solved their own shelter problems. From creating compression washers out of used agricultural hoses to inventing cooking fuels from organic industrial by-products, refugees are creative, innovative and fully capable of leading their own recovery if given the opportunity.
In Uganda, we work with refugees to train them to produce shelter roof tarps that will last for five to 10 years. They are made from repurposed billboard vinyl — old advertising nearly as commonly found in East Africa as it is here. To date, we’ve repurposed over 130 tons of the stuff. Instead of importing bad tarps from abroad, refugees, for the first time, can provide a living for themselves, making shelter goods for other refugees. Refugees are building local businesses serving the needs of their fellow refugees. This is just the start.
We’ve discovered that instead of trying to work through the existing system, it’s best to go directly to refugees themselves to make a new system. Engaging the bureaucracy of the current aid world or navigating product approvals via host country governments is a chore that takes years, money, influence and power. But making co-creative relationships with refugees can be accomplished over a beer or a meal. In my most recent trip to Uganda, I met an entrepreneur making stoves and pairing that product with a briquettes-subscription business, so stove buyers could have a source of reliable fuel. It was brilliant. Innovation is literally everywhere. We don’t need to get approval from an office in Geneva, or continue importing foreign-made tarps.
We envision an entire ecosystem of goods and services for refugees, by refugees. The current system has a part to play and we still work with partners to distribute our flooring solution when the funding is available. I saw the before and after impact the floors have had, but the machines that make it cost millions of dollars. There has to be a better way.
Harnessing optimism
Global conflicts continue to escalate and aren’t ending. It’s easy to lose hope and be overwhelmed by the immensity of the challenge. But what if such a grand challenge actually calls for simple, local, human solutions? What if we actually gave refugees what they need to serve themselves and each other? What if instead of waiting for a new policy from high-level global bodies, we gave a refugee sewist a tool bank? Or gave a refugee carpenter a studio?
Noella Kabala, the attorneyturned-entrepreneur I met from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, now leading the successful sewing operation told us:
“Refugees are strong. They are resilient. When refugees flee from their country, they don’t leave their brain there. They come with their brain full of potential and talents.”
Our aspiration isn’t to end the refugee crisis. We are starting our first shelter depot, where refugees can buy subsidized products that can solve the problems they are experiencing. And those refugee-led training organizations I met with this month — we’re partnering with them to give business and finance training to refugees certified in our Bashe Bora (Better Tarp) program.
We want to build a new refugee aid system. One that dignifies displaced people and aids them in their resiliency for however long they remain far from home, until every single one can create a home, no matter where, no matter for how long.