From camps to neighborhoods: How African cities are reshaping displacement

Traveling through projects in Somalia, South Sudan, and Ethiopia, my colleagues and I kept noticing the same pattern: What we still call “camps” no longer match the neat boxes in humanitarian slide decks. Markets appear where tents once stood. Workshops sit next to food stalls. Schools operate on both sides of old boundaries. The distinction between a “camp” and a “city” is fading much faster than most policies acknowledge.

If I had to explain it at our family dinner table, I would simply say: the places we used to treat as temporary are already functioning as parts of real towns.

Six governments across Africa are responding to this reality, treating these "camps" as emerging sustainable human settlements. This gap between terminology and reality is why we brought mayors, planners, and national and local officials from Mauritania, Chad, Ethiopia, Kenya, Mozambique, and Somalia together for the Cities and Towns Learning Academy on Sustainable Human Settlements in fragility, conflict, and violence (FCV) contexts, co-led with UNHCR and UN-Habitat in Nairobi.

The practical question on the table was straightforward, yet complex: if displacement is long-term, largely urban–often leading to new urban agglomerations–and funding is under pressure, what happens when we stop treating camps as temporary exceptions and start treating them as emerging neighborhoods?

What this looks like on the ground

With over 100 million people currently displaced and funding under pressure, the old playbook of parallel humanitarian systems and perpetual camps supported by aid agencies no longer works. In Baidoa, Somalia, we saw this mismatch up close. For years, more than 100,000 displaced people lived on the edge of the town. Humanitarian agencies operated schools, clinics, and water points there. The municipality managed the “old” city. Two systems ran side by side; both stretched thin. Drought and conflict kept pushing people in. Land pressure intensified.

We witnessed the shift begin with something almost administrative: identifications and birth certificates, backed by simple provisional land documents. Once people had basic papers, they could open bank accounts, register SIM cards, access micro-loans, enroll children in national exams, and start investing in more permanent homes and businesses. The municipality then co-planned market improvements and WASH upgrades with both hosts and displaced residents.

A mayor explained the additional importance of tenure security: We give the land for free; they are free to integrate, without the fear of eviction.

These numbers tell a compelling story. In Kenya's Kakuma-Kalobeyei corridor, the IFC's Challenge Fund supported 126 firms that now generate approximately 3% of Turkana County's formal employment. When we walked through the market there, it did not feel like an “aid operation.” Banks have opened branches. Energy providers are laying permanent infrastructure. What was once an isolated aid operation has become a $56 million annual economy. 

Economic activity in the Kakuma Camp. Photo: World Bank

Putting local governments at the center

One point resurfaced across all countries: durable solutions are determined at municipal level, not in headquarters plans and conference halls. During the Learning Academy in Nairobi, roles shifted deliberately. Mayors and municipal managers sat in the front. Everyone else–including us–literally gathered around those maps. Once local governments have mandates, some revenue, and predictable support, they become strong actors for inclusion. They are the first and daily responders to both hosts and displaced residents.

One standard service, not two parallel systems

We observed that a recurring challenge is the split between humanitarian and government service systems. Humanitarian actors run schools, health facilities, and water infrastructure in and around camps. Government systems serve everyone else. This arrangement is understandable in the first months of a crisis but becomes costly and inequitable when displacement lasts decades.

There is an upside. Governments are beginning to close this gap, with strong support from the tripartite partnership.

Water pump at Garowe IDP settlement. Photo: World Bank

Our World Bank support in some of these countries is assisting: Somalia's recent push to provide national IDs to IDPs, Ethiopia's pilot programs for refugee documentation, and Kenya's integration of refugee data into national statistics represent crucial steps toward what development practitioners call "statistical inclusion" – making displaced populations visible in the data that drives policy and investment decisions. This helps refugees to be integrated into national schools and social protection. The underlying principle is straightforward: a child in a settlement outside Baidoa has the same right to a classroom as a child in the city center.

Looking ahead

No one in the room believed a few promising examples will change the overall picture overnight. Funding pressures are real. Climate shocks continue. Institutional and legal frameworks have yet to fully allow this shift. Political risks remain. And security concerns complicate integration efforts. But this is precisely why the agenda mattered at December’s Global Refugee Forum in Geneva. Countries showed that it is possible to move from short-term fixes to long-term systems, and from fragmented projects to shared platforms involving governments, UNHCR, UN-Habitat, the World Bank, and others.

Our hope is that these experiences will feed into the next World Bank FCV strategy. If we get this right together, ten or fifteen years from now people will no longer talk about “camps” in these places. They’ll talk about ordinary African neighbourhoods that did something extraordinary: turn forced flight into the beginning of a real, shared home.