Poverty, food shortages and a rise in urban slums are just some of the problems aid workers expect from the influx of southerners
JUBA, Sudan (AlertNet) - If south Sudan's independence referendum goes as expected, one of the first challenges the newest country in the world will face is reintegrating massive numbers of returning southerners.
Southerners have been making their way home since the signing of a 2005 peace deal to end a two-decade north-south civil war. But the mass movement has accelerated ahead of the Jan. 9 vote, which is widely expected to result in secession.
By the end of the year, an estimated 400,000 south Sudanese will have made the long journey home, many driven back by fears they will lose their citizenship in the north or be attacked if the south breaks away.
Aid workers fear this mass migration to create more poverty, food shortages, tensions between old and new communities and a rise in urban slums, putting pressure on public services in one of the least developed regions in Africa.
"Now the numbers (of returnees) are increasing and among them you see more and more destitute people,” said Mireille Girard, head of the United Nations’ refugee agency, UNHCR, in south Sudan.
“You find a number of people who sold what they had and don’t have much to start up with.”
TENSIONS
Pushed to leave the north by fear, some of the most recent returnees are ill-prepared for the journey. Thousands do not have the money, transport or support to reach their final destinations.
Aid groups will be providing some extra basic services, such as classrooms and water points in places receiving large numbers of returnees. They are also helping people to find ways of earning a living, such as setting up workshops and making soap.
Aid workers say they are aware of the tensions that may flare when assistance is given to returnees, when the communities they have joined have so little.
“What we're doing at the moment is looking at what the good market opportunities are, that will create good income for people, not only for the returnees but for the communities around,” UNHCR's Girard said.
“You don’t want to create a group of privileged people because then you fuel tension.”
It's not just the tension between the returnees and their home communities that aid workers are worried about.
Ethnic rivalries are common in south Sudan.
In the year to the end of November 2010, there were 242 so-called conflict incidents, newly displacing 221,000 people and killing 937 people, according to the U.N.’s humanitarian coordinating agency, OCHA.
URBAN SLUMS
Another problem posed by the mass return home is growing urbanisation. Many returnees are choosing to settle in urban areas because they have been used to city life in the northern capital, Khartoum.
“There seems to be a tendency for people to move less to their villages of origin and more to county capitals,” said Gerry Waite, head of the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) in south Sudan, which monitors return figures.
But in towns and cities, people are more likely to have to fend for themselves than in rural areas where the community feed and care for the vulnerable, the poor, the elderly, sick and disabled.
“In urban areas, it’s not quite so clear what their survival strategies would be,” said Waite.
The population of south Sudan’s capital, Juba, has doubled from 250,000 to 500,000 people in the last five years, according to the Overseas Development Institute (ODI) think tank.
A swelling urban population is likely to put pressure on supplies of food -- a problem aid agencies, more used to feeding rural populations, are struggling to adapt to.
“We do not know how to address urban food security because it requires very specific programmatic approaches,” said Andrew Odero, head of the World Food Programme’s Vulnerability Analysis and Mapping Unit.
Whereas traditional leaders in rural communities help to identify the poorest among them, it will be harder to know who needs help in more anonymous urban areas.
In a region awash with weapons, the south's insecurity means delivering food to certain areas will be a challenge with fears of looting high.
In more developed countries, such as neighbouring Kenya, aid agencies have given out supermarket vouchers, which are less visible than huge sacks of grain.
“That is difficult to implement in Juba ... It’s something that we have not done before,” Odero said.
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