About 5,000 Kenyans were refugees in Ethiopia at year's end. An estimated 100,000 Kenyans were internally displaced, although sources varied widely. About 50,000 new refugees and asylum seekers fled to Kenya during 1999, primarily from Somalia, Ethiopia, and Sudan. Although Kenya hosted hundreds of thousands of refugees during the 1990s, the country has no refugee law.
Refugees have no legal status in Kenya.
Kenyan authorities required most refugees to live in three designated camps in the country's remote eastern region, near the village of Dadaab, and in three camps in western Kenya, known as Kakuma. The government systematically closed several camps near the coastal city of Mombasa during the late 1990s. By the end of 1999, about 110,000 refugees resided in the Dadaab camps, and some 75,000 refugees lived at the Kakuma sites. Tens of thousands of refugees continued to live without assistance in urban areas, particularly in the capital, Nairobi. Government officials asserted that as many as 100,000 refugees lived in Kenya's main cities and towns.