For the past eight months, home to Dahabo Abdullahi has been a hut made of sticks and plastic sheeting in a “privatised” camp in the Somali capital. Like many of the more than half a million displaced people living in and around Mogadishu, she pays a “gatekeeper” part of her food ration every month as an entry fee and for the provision of basic services.
A single mother with eight children, Abdullahi fled fighting between al-Shabab jihadists and Somali government forces near her village of Basra in the Lower Shabelle region, about 30 kilometres north of the capital, in November last year.
When she arrived in Mogadishu, a former Basra neighbour told her about the makeshift settlement of Sabriye, in the city’s northern Daynille district.
She was allocated a space by the manager of the informal settlement – known as a “gatekeeper” – on the condition that once she registered with the UN’s World Food Programme she would part with a percentage of her ration.
“They took half of everything I was given.”
A local NGO working for WFP delivered Abdullahi’s first food aid in December – 25 kilogrammes of rice, 25 kilogrammes of flour, five kilogrammes of beans, and three litres of cooking oil. When the NGO workers left the camp, the gatekeeper and the owner of the land the settlement occupies approached Abdullahi.
“They took half of everything I was given,” she told The New Humanitarian. “That is what every person in this IDP camp is giving. Though I need all the food, I can’t refuse to give the gatekeeper otherwise they will evict me from the camp.”
Gatekeepers are generally vilified as criminals by the Somali authorities – effectively an informal power structure beyond the government’s control. The international aid system has tried to close its eyes to their presence, an aid worker, who asked not to be named, told TNH.
But in a country with no formal camps and professional camp managers, they link the more than 480 settlements in Mogadishu to the aid system, ensuring the IDPs receive their rations – from which the gatekeepers take a cut.
Given the system is so entrenched, the challenge is to “improve its accountability and transparency”, said Erik Bryld, chief consultant of Tana Copehnagen, a consultancy that has provided training on camp management to gatekeepers under a UK Aid-funded project.
‘Give and take’
There are more than 518,000 IDPs in Mogadishu, displaced from the countryside by drought and conflict. Gatekeepers have developed a business around accommodating them, providing protection and basic services – including dispute settlement, help in emergencies like illness or births, and facilitating crowd-funding for small camp upgrades.
They fill a vacuum left by a weak government incapable of meeting those needs, and a humanitarian community limited in its operations by Mogadishu’s prevailing insecurity, where UN staff can only be in IDP settlements for a maximum of 30 minutes, according to Justin Brady, head of the UN’s emergency aid coordination body, OCHA, in Somalia.
The gatekeeper system is complex. At its worst – exemplified by a Human Rights Watch report, Hostages of the Gatekeepers – it is violent, exploitative, and dehumanising, with IDPs viewed as commodities that can be literally traded between gatekeepers and land owners.
