She was just three, and has never seen her homeland again. Since then she has sought refuge in Zaire, Tanzania, and Rwanda, and sees her own children facing the same unsettled future. A disproportionate number of refugees are women and children. For instance, they make up 80 per cent of those displaced within former Yugoslavia. Three times as many boys as girls receive education while under the care of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees.
Countries are increasingly reluctant to take in refugees.
Even Tanzania, which has had a traditionally liberal attitude towards refugees, became over-burdened by the sheer number of refugees fleeing the wars in the Great Lakes region of Central Africa, and closed down many of its camps at the end of 1996. Poor countries which take in large numbers of refugees deserve greater support from richer countries. But very often it is the people living in the local community itself, rather than a government, who bear the greatest burden on their resources and environment. Local Tanzanians living in the Karagwe district of Tanzania, for example, saw their farms being swallowed up to make way for the huts of Rwandan refugees, and their once-abundant trees being stripped from the hillsides for firewood. We worked as a group, and organised collections at the school.