For Sama: discussion with Afraa Hashem

 

EL Laskar writes:

On 10 December the 19th Oxford Human Rights Festival in collaboration with the Oxford Brookes Documentary club screened the award winning documentary 'For Sama' which was followed by a Q & A with Afraa Hashem. FOR SAMA is both an intimate and epic journey into the female experience of war. A love letter from a young mother to her daughter, the film tells the story of Waad al-Kateab's life through five years of the uprising in Aleppo, Syria as she falls in love, gets married and gives birth to Sama, all while cataclysmic conflict rises around her. FOR SAMA is the winner of many awards including the BAFTA for Best Documentary in 2020.

Recently settled in London with her family, Afraa Hashem is a teacher, human rights activist and is featured throughout the documentary.The Director of the Centre of Development and Emergency Practice (CENDEP), Professor Cathrine Brun talks to Afraa about her experiences as an educator, wife, mother and friend in a war zone. 

Find out more about the 19th Oxford Human Rights Festival 2021 here.

Refugia: a durable solution?

 

Nick Van Hear writes:

This blog is based on a contribution to the webinar hosted by CENDEP on ‘Rethinking solutions in never ending displacement: what are the alternatives?’  held on 1 December 2020.

I want to approach the question through an experiment in social science fiction that I have been engaged in with my colleague Robin Cohen over the past few years.  We have tried to imagine a new kind of transnational entity, called Refugia, that has tentatively established itself by the year 2030, against the background of continuing global turmoil and mass displacement.  Refugia is essentially the outcome of a socio-political movement of refugees and supporters which takes off in the early 2020s in the face of the failure of the durable solutions and the wider refugee regime to provide solutions to mass displacement on the scale needed. The transnational entity has been built up incrementally from the transnational practices of refugees and other people on the move. 

Education in Emergencies: five critical points for shifting power

 

An informal school for Syrian children in Beirut (Photo C Brun)

Cathrine Brun and Maha Shuayb* write:

Over the past 20 years, efforts to include education in humanitarian response, framed as Education in Emergencies (EiE), have been quite successful. However, EiE work and its conceptualisation are fraught with challenges. Arguably, there has been insufficient critique of the field. Here, we present five points of critique of education in emergency based on our research experience in Lebanon. In conclusion, we suggest ways forward to address these gaps. 

Oxford Human Rights Festival events this week

The 19th annual Oxford Human Rights festival is upon us, with the theme of Disruption. The main festival will be next March, but please check out these three important and interesting events happening this week.

Quiz & Discussion 
Tuesday 8 DEC 2020
5pm - 6.30pm 
Orange The World -  Elimination of Violence against Women

As part of the UN Women International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women 2020, Basma El Doukhi will lead an interactive session to challenge assumptions and raise awareness around the facts of gender based violence.Click here for more info and booking >>

ONLINE SCREENING + Q&A 
Thursday 10 DEC 2020
7PM - 10PM
​'FOR SAMA' & Q&A 
​with Afraa Hashem

FOR SAMA is the winner of many awards including the BAFTA for Best Documentary 2020. Q&A with Afraa Hashem. 18 cert. In collaboration with Oxford Brookes Documentary Club and OxHRF.  Click here for more info and booking>>

ONLINE DISCUSSION
Friday 11 DEC 2020
5.30PM - 6.30PM (UK)
'Can the UK lead on climate change?
The CEE Bill and our future'

Join the CEE Bill Alliance Oxfordshire as we celebrate our climate change achievements locally and in the UK and discuss how we can continue to have strong climate leadership into the future. In collaboration with CEE Bill Alliance Oxfordshire. Click here for more info and booking>>

Celebrating Syria

Angela Hatherell writes:

It has been my pleasure and honour to be involved in Celebrating Syria: a festival of art and culture since its inception in 2017. The festival, organised by Manchester based charity Rethink Rebuild Society, is completely free and all online this year because of the pandemic, which means that both audience and performers can take part from wherever they are in the world. Rethink Rebuild's mission, as well as to improve the lives of refugees and asylum seekers in the UK, is to keep Syria alive in the public consciousness, especially at this time when the pandemic has distracted the global community and media from the issues surrounding conflict zones around the world. The Celebrating Syria festival showcases Syrian talent and brings people together to experience Syrian arts and culture, and hopefully changes people's perception of Syria as being merely another war torn region of the Middle East. 

Human rights practice in the age of pandemic

This image is from an important report from Frontline Defenders on human rights defenders and COVID-19

Richard Carver writes:

The practice of human rights, like most other spheres of human activity, has been radically affected by the novel coronavirus pandemic. COVID-19 has had an enormous impact on the way that we go about our work, whether we are scholars or practitioners in the field. But equally we would like to believe that our practice is of some relevance to those affected by the virus—which is to say all of us. Without trying to claim that human rights have an answer for every human problem, or for every aspect of this current crisis, it is not too immodest to claim that we have something to offer.

As an academic journal we are not best placed to respond quickly to the demands of this rapidly developing situation. Indeed, like many other enterprises, our own work has been disrupted and delayed. However, in order to offer an initial response to the human rights challenges of COVID-19, we asked several practitioners and scholars from different corners of the world to reflect on these challenges. This is not, obviously, intended as a comprehensive inventory of the questions that need to be addressed—and aspects may already be outdated by the time this issue is published. It is, however, a first take. We hope that, in the coming months, other contributors will offer their own experience and research on human rights practice in the conditions of pandemic, including your responses to the articles in this special forum.

It should hardly be necessary to assert the continued relevance of human rights in the present context. As several of our contributors in this issue note, governmental responses to COVID-19 tend to be true to their underlying character and to expose ‘the existing fault lines in our society’ (Supriya Akerkar). As András Kádár puts it, the Hungarian right-wing populist government responds to the pandemic as it does because it is ‘in its nature’. China initially reacted with censorship and repression, while the United States employed xenophobia and magical thinking. The latter has been uniquely badly affected not only because of the malignancy and ineptitude of its leadership, but also because of the lack of an adequate social safety net, including universal health care. There appear to be few redemption stories where governments exceed expectations, although those with prior experience of epidemics and the need for testing and contact-tracing have performed better. These include countries, such as several in Africa, not routinely regarded as models of good governance. This tendency for a ‘natural’ catastrophe to highlight pre-existing social characteristics explains the popularity of plague literature—Camus, Defoe and others enjoy late sales booms—as well as generating opportunities for human rights practitioners. This is much of the emphasis of Alicia Ely Yamin’s piece: the pandemic both exposes existing inequities and sets a possible agenda to transcend them.

Yamin offers a broad-reaching and radical agenda, founded on the possibility that the present protracted crisis offers opportunities as well as threats. A question that arises, however, is about the capacity of the human rights movement to make its voice heard, never mind taking control of the moment. While human rights organizations and scholars have not been slow to offer analysis and interpretation of the social and political dimensions of the pandemic, there is no evidence that our voices are widely heard or that we are influencing policy where it matters. Eda Seyhan offers one route: narrow the focus of human rights work. Paul Gready offers a different one: working at a local level to influence policy at the grass roots.

Much public discussion in recent months has been about the extent to which restrictions on some rights might be necessary in order to protect others. As Gready discusses, human rights law offers a well calibrated approach for balancing conflicting interests and rights. The notion that freedom of movement, for example, might be limited in order to protect the right to health is not exotic or unusual to readers of this journal but is the bread and butter of many human rights practitioners (even though our experience may be with other combinations of rights). Of course, there may then be overreach, either deliberate because of the nature of the regime (Kádár) or because of innate tendencies, even of democratic governments (Seyhan). We may then disagree among ourselves about the policy implications. Seyhan argues that human rights organizations, at least in the global North, should be focused on the threat to civil and political rights. Other contributors, notably Gready and Yamin, emphasize the importance of human rights practitioners addressing health rights among other economic and social rights.

One of the challenges to human rights practitioners is understanding the nature of vulnerability in the pandemic. For example, we are used to reflexively labelling children as vulnerable—yet they are clearly less susceptible to the disease than adults. But this itself does not mean that they are no longer vulnerable, especially in situations where poverty is exacerbated by both the pandemic and the response to it. Other fault lines also become relevant in understanding the impact of the virus. Racial disparities in many countries appear to map directly onto susceptibility to infection and mortality. Gender is central: women are often victims of the pandemic, for example through an upsurge in domestic violence, even though they are apparently less susceptible to infection than men. Martha Fineman’s claim that vulnerability is a ‘universal, inevitable, enduring aspect of the human condition’ is useful here, reminding us that vulnerability is always contextual and that the concept may be a more flexible one than traditional understandings of equality. Supriya Akerkar argues the need for ‘radical equality’ in our approach to vulnerability of older people and those with disabilities. Lukas Muntingh looks at a uniquely vulnerable section of society that is seldom found on lists of those who should be protected against discrimination: people deprived of their liberty. The treatment of prisoners is often described as a test of the humaneness of a society, just as the response to a pandemic is seen as exposing society’s underlying values. The treatment of prisoners in a pandemic is thus a double test, in which African governments, according to Muntingh, have a mixed record. He points to the complexity of the problem; prisons are a hotbed of infection, yet released prisoners without adequate support will likely find themselves even more vulnerable.

If we are honest, we do not yet understand the implications of any of this. We do not know whether the pandemic has handed dangerous new powers that governments will abuse—or created a new sense of social solidarity that will allow fuller realization of health rights and better protection of the vulnerable. Or perhaps the outcome will be uneven, possibly returning to something resembling the pre-existing ‘normal’. But we will be living with the new normal for a while yet and the challenges for human rights practice are immense.

This is the introduction to a special feature in the Journal of Human Rights Practice ((c) Oxford University Press). All articles in the feature are free to read. Just click on the links.

How to stop torture

Mel Nowicki from the School of Social Sciences writes: 

As part of our School's new Centre for Environment and Society, myself and Tom Chambers are developing a research cluster on the theme of Space & Temporality. As a cluster we hope to draw in disciplinary positionalities from across the social sciences including Human Geography, Social/Cultural Anthropology, Sociology, International Relations and Politics as well as aligned fields such as architecture, history, art and theatre. The cluster will launch officially in the new year (look out for updates!), but we are happy to announce that we are running a short seminar series this semester by way of introduction. 

Our first seminar will take place next Thursday 22nd October at 2-3pm, with a talk by Dr Richard Carver entitled ''Stopping Torture: What Works?''. Richard researches and teaches human rights in the Centre for Development and Emergency Practice in the School of Architecture at Oxford Brookes University. He is also editor of the Journal of Human Rights Practice (Oxford). Richard’s research focuses on the institutional protection of human rights, in particular the rights of people deprived of liberty. Does Torture Prevention Work? (with Lisa Handley, Liverpool University Press, 2016) was a pioneering multi-country study of the effectiveness of the torture prevention methods advocated by international legal authorities and anti-torture campaigners. The research found that although many recommended preventive steps had a positive impact, some did not. It also found that the preventive measures most strongly embedded in international law were not necessarily those that worked best in reducing the risk of torture. 

Everyone is very welcome to attend - please find the Zoom link to the event here: https://brookes.zoom.us/j/85173583940?pwd=RVpnZDlRaEY1b1dCcDREWlZGMnRhUT09 

Meeting ID: 851 7358 3940 

Passcode: 1393453612

Podcast on CENDEP torture research

Mural on a wall in Bethlehem (Photo credit: Rory Carnegie)

Richard Carver writes:

Oxford Brookes has been boosting its public engagement through a series of podcasts by researchers from across the university explaining their research in an accessible way. I was one of the first to be interviewed back in February, but publication has been delayed for reasons that may be obvious. Now there is a rapidly growing list of podcasts. You can listen to mine by clicking here. Then follow the link on the left of that screen to find eight more (at the time of writing).

Welcome to CENDEP: our September 2020 newsletter

 

Voices from the 18th OXHRF: Resilience through art - Sketch Club, Quetta, Pakistan

Syed Fazil Hussein

My students have the power and the ability to convert their feelings and emotions onto the canvas. The best option we have is to begin the process of catharsis within ourselves and the best way for catharsis is to paint, to do poetry, write essays, fictions and novels. This allows for the process of catharsis to continue, the work we do also becomes part of our history and we get to release the pain and suffering we are feeling. This is the best form of resilience.  (Syed Fazil Hussain, Founder Sketch Club)

EL Laskar writes: 

This year we had the opportunity to showcase the work of Syed Fazil Hussain alongside art work from his students. Fazil is the founder of Sketch Club and he has been running an art project in Quetta, Balochistan Province, in Pakistan since 2009. He has been teaching and nurturing art to the Hazara youth and wider community. Fatimia Hashmi, CENDEP PhD candidate, is currently focusing her research on the Hazara community and introduced the Sketch Club story on this blog early this year - you can link here to get a deeper insight into the initiative.

During my fieldwork conducted between January and April 2019, most of the young participants mentioned how the ‘Sketch Club’ had been their saviour when the conditions in Quetta were turbulent to such an extent that the targeted killings of the Hazara community were on a daily or weekly basis. Without a doubt, I was intrigued to find out more about ‘Sketch Club’ - I quickly discovered it was run by my primary and secondary school Art teacher, Syed Fazil Hussain. (Fatima Hashmi)

Voices from the 18th OXHRF: Global voices - what does resilience mean to you?

 EL Laskar writes: 

The Oxford Human Rights Festival held a global competition this year which was instigated by one of the planning committee, Geena Whiteman. 

Young people aged 11+ and adults of all ages were invited to submit a short essay on their personal experiences of resilience and human rights. 

The Junior (11 -17 years) entrants were asked “What does resilience mean to you in your local community?” And the Senior(18 years +) entrants were asked “Explore Human Rights and resilience as you understand the two. How do you think your view will differ from how someone from a country currently facing mass human rights violations? 

Geena Whiteman, who administered the competition, said “We were delighted to have entries from almost every single continent in the world (besides Antarctica!). This is the first year this competition has been run, with an overwhelmingly positive response and an abundance of incredible entries that took a long time to get through. Many people shared their stories, their opinions and their lives with us, telling us what resilience means to them and their community, and in the context of human rights.” 

The judges had a challenge to pick a winner in each category - each individual shared their experiences, challenges and aspirations. We were struck by the passion and storytelling of each entrant. All the essays were bound together and exhibited as part of the festival exhibition experience.

Reading the essays at the opening of the festival on 13 March

For us as humanitarians, academics, policy makers and students, individual stories matter  - they are lived experiences and they help guide us in how we can better support human rights violations. With over 50 entries from across the globe, we introduce the winning essays in both the senior and junior categories.

The Screaming Womb: Life Amid Despair

 Grace Khawam writes:

Artist: Joan Abou-Haidar, August 2020

She was born in the Golden Era. She was as beautiful as the sunshine in fields of wheat on a hot summer day. A happy childhood, playfully spent in carnival-like markets full of colored silk, rose water soap, scents of thyme and jasmine flowers. Visitors came from all over the world to see her, to admire her beauty as she turned into a shy teenager. Movie theaters, concerts, cultural spaces, were bursting with admirers, where poetry and music intertwined, drunken souls dancing through endless nights. Nothing predicting what will happen to her next. A bus attacked and all its passengers killed. A war declared. Scared, naïve, she is caught in the clashes, with nowhere to hide. Her body is bruised from beatings, punctured by gunfire. She endured, silently, crying tears of blood, as she witnessed hatred, greed and terror. Fifteen years of civil war, but she withstood. She stood up, an unyielding fierce young woman, prepared to pick up her shattered pieces and ready to give again. And she gave. With generosity. With love. With peace. She became the symbol of cultural diversity, of metropolitanism, of urban prosperity, of religious tolerance. This is when her fathers, her kin, but also strangers started to take interest in her. Strong, greedy men of power. Warlords. “We will save you” they told her. She needed no saving, but they did not listen to her. The self-proclaimed protectors spread out their grasps, clutching her throat, trapping her with their wretched claws. She became a prisoner. A prisoner of their narcissism and corruption. A prisoner of their business deals. She gave birth to sons and daughters, the product of her rape. She raised them with so much care and affection, with much respect for themselves and love for their country, only to see them runaway to faraway lands, escaping the clenches of the greedy powerful men. They carry with them their dreams and their memories, and her blood running through their veins, wherever they go. She is an older woman now. With heavy steps and painful memories, she moves on, as she has always done. We can still hear the songs written for her by long lost lovers. Many will chant her name, in the faint hope of reawakening her beautiful youthful days. 

Until it happened. The day that changed her forever. A massive explosion blows her body, ripping her from the inside. An explosion caused by them, the greedy evil men. Betrayed by her lovers, abused by her protectors, she lies still on the floor, her bloodied hands on her butchered womb. From the top of her collapsed lungs, she screams in pain and agony. "What have you done to me?" she cries in despair. "What have you done?"

We all know her story. We all know her name. She is Beirut. 

Why humanitarian action must promote healthier homes for all

Emma Weinstein-Sheffield and Sue Webb write:

World Humanitarian Day on 19th August reminds us that “in 2020, nearly 168 million people will need humanitarian assistance and protection. This represents 1 in about 45 people in the world, and is the highest figure in decades” (UN website). The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has brought into focus how poor housing quality and overcrowding can be detrimental to both mental and physical health.

Housing and humanitarian shelter programmes can contribute to the Global Humanitarian Response Plan to COVID-19, especially its strategic priorities to “contain the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic and decrease morbidity and mortality”. Leilani Farha, the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to adequate housing, noted recently that “housing has become the front-line defence against the coronavirus”. Currently though, many aspects of inadequate housing, in rich countries as well as poorer ones, contribute to significant inequalities in mortality and morbidity.

Prioritising indoor air quality in building design can mitigate future airborne viral outbreaks, discussed in recently published research on how poor indoor air quality can amplify the effects of airborne viruses such as COVID-19:

“Rather than promoting health and wellbeing, our built environment often worsens air quality through inadequate ventilation, air recirculation, material specification and the additional pollution load from mechanical heating and cooling.”

This is arguably particularly true in humanitarian settings where people are frequently living in poorly ventilated, crowded conditions and with insufficient access to clean water and sanitation facilities. Responses to humanitarian crises can provide an opportunity to ensure that ‘healthy housing’ is an integral part of future shelter responses. Indeed, good humanitarian shelter programming can have beneficial impacts on mental and physical health that can reach beyond the current pandemic and contribute to healthier lives in the short- and long-term.

Voices from the 18th OXHRF: What is the role of tech in human rights?

El Laskar writes:

As part of the festival this year, committee member Geena Whiteman organised a Human Rights Lab challenge where participants were invited to place human rights at the forefront of technology, innovation and entrepreneurial thinking. With a focus on resilience and through the support of a series of workshops, participants would have had one week to formulate, plan and pitch their ideas to a group of distinguished judges. Sadly COVID-19 took centre stage and the programme had to be cancelled. 

Geena’s Hackathon idea highlighted that technology has an enormous role to play in human rights and the humanitarian sector. Tech For Good Global says “Tech is neither good, nor bad and definitely not neutral. Which is why we need to be intentional about the use of tech in tackling the world's pressing social and environmental challenges.” A movement popularised in the 90s, when hack weekends were organised to bring web developers and the third sector together to create solutions, we have seen a swell of interest in #techforgood over recent years.

OXHRF Refugee week events

(c) UNHCR

Basma El Doukhi (DEP 2019-20) reports on World Refugee Day and Refugee Week:

UNHCR’s annual Global Trends report for 2020 showed that forced displacement is now affecting more than one per cent of humanity – 1 in every 97 people – and with fewer and fewer of those who flee being able to return home. The report, which was published two days ahead of 20 June World Refugee Day, shows that an unprecedented 79.5 million were displaced as of the end of 2019.

 

“We are witnessing a changed reality in that forced displacement nowadays is not only vastly more widespread but is simply no longer a short-term and temporary phenomenon,” said UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi. “People cannot be expected to live in a state of upheaval for years on end, without a chance of going home, nor a hope of building a future where they are. We need a fundamentally new and more accepting attitude towards all who flee, coupled with a much more determined drive to unlock conflicts that go on for years and that are at the root of such immense suffering.”

Day of International Criminal Justice - watch now

Here is the complete video of the joint event by CENDEP, the Oxford Human Rights Festival and Oxford City of Sanctuary to mark the Day of International Criminal Justice on 17 July.

Whose voice counts? The fight for justice

Friday, 17 July is the Day of International Criminal Justice. It marks the anniversary of the adoption of the Rome Statute on 17 July 1998, the founding treaty of the International Criminal Court, which seeks to protect people from genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and the crime of aggression. 17 July unites all those who wish to support justice, promote victims' rights, and help prevent crimes that threaten the peace, security and well-being of the world.

To mark this day CENDEP, Oxford Human Rights Festival and Oxford City of Sanctuary have organised a panel discussion on the theme: Whose voice counts? The focus of the discussion will be the Rohingya people and their struggle for justice. 

Reading Broken Cities: Inside the Global Housing Crisis

Anna Lindley writes:

In large cities all over the world, people talk about ‘the housing problem’ or the ‘housing crisis’ – but what exactly do they mean? And to what extent is it a global problem, or many different problems? Are we on the edge of a very different kind of urban future? These are the questions that Deborah Potts tackles in her tour-de-force book Broken Cities, published by Zed earlier this year. The neoliberal approach tends to frame the problem as one of market supply – that there is a shortage of housing or land to build on. If enough houses are built, the market logic goes, prices will fall and become affordable. But research suggests that while house-building may help those on the edges of the affordability line, they tend to have limited impact on the majority of those on low incomes, who fall well below. Drawing on decades of research and teaching focusing on urban centres in Southern Africa, the UK and elsewhere, Deborah Potts emphasizes the role of demand-side problems driving the affordability conundrum. While poorer people in these cities undoubtedly need housing, they do not have near enough income to secure what is understood as a ‘decent’, ‘legal’ home. While unemployment can make this worse, most people thus affected are in fact in work – the stark reality is that their employers just do not pay truly liveable wages. In many cities, incomes at the bottom end of the spectrum have long fallen short of the cost of social reproduction (particularly the rising cost of housing) and the minimum pay and pensions increases that would be required to rectify this are so big as to be unlikely without major political transformation. 

Broken Cities illuminates common responses of low-income city-dwellers to the affordability challenge. People may squeeze on space (e.g. crowding families or co-workers into one room, co-ordinating bed use around shift patterns); they may resort to more basic or improvised structures (e.g. trailers, subdivided housing units, office conversions, backyard shacks, squats); they may live in informal settlements on city peripheries (in cheap housing close enough to employment opportunities but with insecure tenure and poor conditions); they may fall into an itinerant, ‘hidden homeless’ existence (sofa-surfing or spending prolonged periods in ‘temporary’ accommodation). These are pragmatic, bottom-up, informal ‘solutions’ that avoid street homelessness but are a very long way from what most people think of as an appropriate home – and indeed may be endangering to health and contravene local housing standards. A particular strength of the book is its global and historical reach, connecting urban housing problems across the world, probing contextual detail, differences and distinctiveness, but always with a close eye on common features and the core conundrum of affordability of decent housing for the poorest in society.

Police reform: lessons from CENDEP research

Photo credit: Wikipedia

Richard Carver writes:

George Floyd was tortured to death. This is not how his death is usually described, but it meets the clear definition of torture in international law: it was severe pain and suffering inflicted by a state agent for a deliberate purpose, in this instance racial animus or discrimination. CENDEP’s Lisa Handley and I directed a multi-country study to determine which were the most effective measures to deter torture, published as Does Torture Prevention Work? (Liverpool University Press 2016). Some of our findings have a direct relevance to the problem of police violence against African-Americans.

The most important measures to prevent torture are safeguards in the hours and days after arrest, including detention being recorded, notification of a family member or friend, and prompt access to a lawyer and medical examination. George Floyd was in police custody – defined as being unable to leave freely – and was informed that he was under arrest. The justification for the use of force was that Floyd was resisting arrest, although the videos taken by bystanders show that this was not so.

COVID-19 and informal settlements

Photo: 1to1 Agency of Engagement, 2020

Chloe Loader writes:

The emergence of novel coronavirus COVID-19 has had huge social and economic impact, causing high excess mortality and significant economic decline. The pandemic has and is affecting different groups disproportionately, its effects amplified by existing challenges in housing. As humanitarians respond to the ongoing crisis, it is vital to understand and implement key aspects of the humanitarian development nexus to address long-term impacts. This blog post will focus on the risks being faced by those in informal settlements during the pandemic, predominantly considering those in South Africa. Inadequate housing is strongly linked to an increased vulnerability to disease due to overcrowding, poor ventilation, sanitation and lack of services This particularly impacts communities facing additional hazards such as flooding and fires, increasing the risk of transmission and chance of infection. The pandemic has highlighted the inequality experienced by these communities, with social distancing and self-isolation a privilege not accessible to all.

Key questions:

What are the increased risks for residents of informal settlements to infectious diseases, such as COVID-19?

How can design principles be implemented in informal settlements to allow for social distancing and/or safe hygienic practices?

How can humanitarian responses to COVID-19 incorporate development initiatives that prevent communities from facing long-term vulnerability to infectious diseases?

Existing literature on the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on residents of informal settlements is so far limited due to a lack of quantitative data. However, there are organisations such as 1to1 Agency of Engagement that are working on the ground directly with residents to engage communities with making masks and provide handwashing facilities and soap. There is however literature discussing the impacts of other infectious diseases, which will impact residents in similar ways.  Investigation of the impacts of COVID-19 on informal settlements is vital so that long-term management practices, spatial adaptations, attitude changes and increased availability of resources can be implemented for residents. With unreliable data available for many countries, particularly for informal settlements, it is difficult to establish the extent of the issue. Cases for low and middle income countries, such as Brazil, Peru and South Africa are currently rising, highlighting the increased risk to poorer communities.

My personal experience working in South Africa this year in January, not long before the first cases of COVID-19 were detected in the country, highlighted to me the risk of infection for people living in informal settlements. It is difficult to understand fully the conditions of a slum until you have experienced it. Overcrowding and lack of hygiene/access to facilities is a daily norm. In South Africa, residents have been fighting for their homes to be legalised, electricity and water to be installed and conditions to become safe. This is a long process, with many political and economic hurdles to overcome. On my return to the UK, the people I met in South Africa have been at the front of my mind as the pandemic has worsened, unable to comprehend the risk that these vulnerable communities now face. While COVID-19 has caused suffering for so many globally, the impact of livelihood/education/living conditions of many in developed countries is minimal in comparison to the most vulnerable communities.

Voices from OxHRF: ‘Bits of Borno’ - life in the midst of crisis

Celebrations - Party from Bits of Borno (Photo (c) Fati Abubakar)

Elizabeth Laskar writes: There has been a gruelling conflict between the military and non-state armed groups in the north eastern regions of Nigeria for over 10 years. It has resulted in serious human rights violations and the desperate need for humanitarian assistance for the populations trapped in the middle. In the states of Borno, Adamawa and Yobe approximately 14,400 people have been killed, 53 percent of the total population of 13.4 million need humanitarian assistance, 1.3 million people have been internally displaced and 38% suffer daily from food insecurity. Terror, violence and conflict continue to plague these states. 

The terror group Boko Haram (meaning ‘western education is forbidden’) claims the state of Borno as their stronghold and continues to commit acts of terror in the region and neighbouring states of Chad and Niger who have been enveloped into the crisis. Between 2013 and 2015 the group killed more than 11,000 people and today the UN reports that 2.4 million people have been displaced in Nigeria and in the neighbouring countries. Unicef reports that over 1000 children have been abducted since 2013 by the group which includes the kidnapping of over 200 girls from a school in Chibok in 2014. 100 girls are still missing. A narrative of terror continues to be reported through news and media and stories of strength and resilience of the IDPs are often overlooked.

‘Bits of Borno’ is a project that chronicles the everyday lives of individuals and communities in the state of Borno. The project was instigated by Fati Abubakar, a celebrated Nigerian documentary photographer, photojournalist, and public health worker from the capital of Borno, Maiduguri. 

Through her photography, Fati wants people to bear witness to a different perspective of her hometown and she also aims to strengthen a narrative of hope within the IDP communities themselves. She feels her work counters the violent extremist message of Boko Haram - her passion is about creating counter-narratives for the underrepresented communities. 

‘Bits of Borno’ is a collection of unique stories that share the lives of the internally displaced through photographs of people living, working and thriving in the state of Borno. The pictures give a glimpse into the incredible ability for people to bounce back and over time begin to tell a new story.