WHERE ARE THE WORLD'S LARGEST REFUGEE CAMPS??

With multiple wars and conflicts raging around our world, thousands of civilians continue to flee their homes. Whole families leave their hometowns in haste, sometimes with only the clothes on their backs.

How do these tragedies add up? The current number of global refugees is in the MILLIONS. According to recent United Nations data, there are now over 42 million refugees in our troubled world.

Now, for the general public, most people believe that anyone who flees their home due to war/conflict/oppression/disaster is a refugee. Those of us who do NGO work know, that the technical definition of a refugee, is a person who has fled for those reasons across a national border; from one country to another. Those who flee to shelter within their own country, are technically called ‘Internally Displaced People’, or IDPs for short.

How many of these unfortunate people are there in the world? According to combined data from United Nations agencies such as UNHCR, UNDESA, IOM, plus the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) there are even more IDPs, than there are refugees! There are globally around 76 MILLION Internally Displaced People in the world.

I always thought that ‘Displacement’, was a terribly inadequate term; it seems to sanitize and soften the reality, which is that millions of people are actually in an awful and difficult living situation, forced to flee inside their country for survival. What their ‘IDP’ really means, is that if they didn’t flee, they would probably die, or suffer other awful consequences. So in official UN and government documents, refugee camps and IDP camps are classified separately, and are also classified differently for legal designations.

The more fortunate people end up in housing or with host families, but too many of these people end up in refugee camps, or IDP camps. HUGE and crowded camps! I’ve done some NGO work in the Dadaab refugee camp, (one of the world’s largest) and I was stunned at the size, and the numbers of people who shelter there.

So with apologies to NGO purists, I’m going to include both the refugee camps and IDP camps together, in this list of the “10 Largest Refugee (and IDP) Camps in the World”. This data is unified from UNHCR, IOM, UNRWA, and UNOCHA.

Kutupalong Refugee Camp in Bangladesh hosts Rohingya refugees. (Maaz Hussain)

It’s notable that these numbers change daily. Fighting breaks out or restarts, and new refugees/IDPs arrive. Other days, other people are resettled out of the camps. In some cases, numbers in a camp will rise and fall, as some people leave, and then return later, whether by force or voluntarily. In some conflict countries, people have been fleeing intermittently for years, even DECADES. (Such as Somalia, South Sudan, and the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo.)

Another important point on the data: In Gaza, rather than 1 camp, it is listed as “Collective”. Due to the ongoing conflict, the UN has given all of the settlements sheltering the Palestinians in Gaza in the camps this special designation, as the situation continues to be fluid and dangerous. Many of these camps are not a single camp, but a complex of camp settlements.

Of this top 10 list in numbers, only Kakuma in Kenya is listed as hosting more than 1 type of nationality: South Sudanese and Somalis. But it is also true that in many other refugee camps, they often host many different ethnic groups within the same camp.

How many refugees/IDPs do these camps hold? The above total adds up to: 5,390,000 people.

And this are just the 10 most populated refugee/IDP camps. There are many, many more.

Make no mistake: these are not just statistics. Those sheltering there, are not just refugees. And they are not just IDPs.

THEY ARE PEOPLE!

And our world should take much better care of them.