Ethiopia was still hosting hundreds of thousands of refugees in June 2019, but most of them had no route into training or paid work. At a camp about 28 kilometres from Assosa, the capital of Benishangul-Gumuz, Gasominar Mboneza Innocent described years without a school or a trade. He told Anadolu Agency he was 18 when he and a younger brother left Goma in 2012, walking through Uganda and South Sudan to reach Ethiopia. He said he had no news of the family left behind, and that camp food and daily life were hard to adjust to. He volunteers with Plan International at the nearby Sherkole camp.
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees said fewer than 18 percent of refugees were reaching livelihood activities. Those activities include skills training, small-business help, and small-scale gardening. The agency put its 2019 Ethiopia plan at 47 percent funded, leaving a 53 percent gap. In Benishangul-Gumuz, six camps held 63,590 refugees: Bambasi, Kamashi, Tongo, Gure Shombola, Tsore, and Sherkole. A statement cited in the report put the national refugee total at 905,831 as of 31 August 2018. Most came from South Sudan, Somalia, Eritrea, and Sudan. At the camp where Innocent spoke, the agency counted 11,017 refugees and asylum seekers. He said about 500 of them were Congolese.
The same country was also supporting a large population of people displaced inside its borders. The refugee agency counted 3.19 million internally displaced people, and the government put that figure at 2.8 million. Ethiopia was still described as keeping an open door, with education and employment among the rights granted to refugees. During World Refugee Day week, Assistant High Commissioner George Okoth-Obbo called for better funding and more schooling in refugee communities. Equatorial Guinea’s president, Teodoro Obiang Nguema, visited Tsome camp on an African Union trip and pledged 50,000 dollars for those communities. Innocent was among the people on hand for that visit.
Sources: Anadolu Agency