‘When We See Refugees, We Should See Opportunity'

Time​ Magazine

4 days ago

It was heartbreak that almost ended Faduma Abukar. But an opportunity enabled her to turn it into a new beginning. For years, the Somali refugee had treated painting as a lonely release while living in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa, a catharsis to express the pain and frustration of being stuck in a foreign land with few prospects and an uncertain future.
Every time Faduma's mother went to the local Internet café to speak to their father, who was toiling as a migrant worker 5,000 miles away in northern Europe, she would beg the manager for scraps of used printing paper to bring home to Faduma and her six sisters. The family had no television at home and barely enough food—just two meals a day of rice and vegetables. 'Meat was a real luxury we had maybe once every three months,' Faduma, 26, tells TIME.
As refugees without official documentation, school or official work was out of reach, rendering drawing and painting their only escape from a bleak existence inside those four walls. 'Because we did have money, we just had to stay at home,' Faduma recalls. 'You cannot go to school; you cannot really go outside.'
A childhood friend who had earlier moved from Addis to Canada and had been suggested as a possible husband for Faduma offered a ray of hope. 'My mom loved him; my sisters loved him,' she says. 'He was really the perfect guy for me.' But there was a problem. As the suitor belonged to a rival Somali tribe, Faduma's father stubbornly refused to sanction the union. 'He was so angry,' recalls Faduma.
Around the same time, a dear cousin of Faduma's died after falling into a deep depression sparked by her parents similarly rejecting a love match. 'I saw my cousin getting sicker and I thought I faced the same destiny,' recalls Faduma, eyes welling.
Faduma's heartbreak and ongoing acrimony with her father led her to embrace art as a form of therapy, pouring her pain and rage onto the page. Then, in late 2022, Faduma heard that the French Embassy was calling for submissions for murals on its perimeter wall to celebrate 125 years of bilateral relations with Ethiopia. Despite no formal artistic experience or training, Faduma's application was accepted.
'It was really such a big wall!' she recalls. 'But they give us many colors, brushes, and everything. I was so happy to paint there.'
The result is remarkable: a wave of primary pointillism as a lone figure aided by supporting hands pushes away a grey tableau of grim torture. This highly acclaimed work brought Faduma into contact with more local artists and with it more opportunities. Before long, her work was featured in UNICEF's U-Report Ethiopia program, and she has since even held a solo exhibition. Today, Faduma's paintings fetch several hundred dollars—enough to support her family and provide some semblance of independence. 'I think art saved my life,' says Faduma.
Faduma's story is a remarkable example of a lamentably common phenomenon amongst the global refugee community—that of hidden talent that simply requires an outlet to thrive. How to unlock that potential is an increasingly hot topic given recent sweeping aid cuts just as the global displaced population breaks new records, with 123.2 million people forcibly displaced at the end of 2024. That's one out of every 67 people on Earth—the vast majority of whom are desperate to contribute but forced to live on handouts or toil in society's shadows. In simple economic terms, it's a colossal waste of productivity.
Still, how to handle refugees, asylum seekers, and economic migrants has become a charged issue in the West, contributing to resurgent right-wing politics across Europe and North America. Ethiopia, however, has taken a refreshingly progressive tact despite its significant economic and social challenges. The landlocked East African nation of 130 million is the continent's second biggest host of refugees, numbering 1.1 million from a total of 38 countries, though predominantly from Sudan, South Sudan, Somalia, and Eritrea.
Since March last year, Ethiopia has started giving refugees versions of the national digital 'Fayda' IDs, facilitating access to services like healthcare, education, and financial institutions. For Faduma, it meant she was able to open a bank account to sell her paintings openly for the first time. 'This is the thing that I'm most grateful for,' she says. 'It helped me a lot to have a bank account.'
Legitimatizing refugees has had a transformative effect. In Ethiopia today, Eritrean refugees have opened cafes, Yemenis now make and sell handcrafts, and at least one refugee from Burundi is working as a photographer. They can help not only themselves but their communities also. Raba Abdur fled her native Sudan to Ethiopia in 2011 and is currently studying psychology after winning a scholarship from a University in Kenya. 'I want to be a counselor as my community, especially women and girls, face a lot of issues in the camps,' she says. 'Some of them get married early and can't continue school. So I really want to help educate them.'
As well as easing access to documentation, the UNHCR is also moving away from housing refugees in the archetypal tented refugee camp, embracing a new paradigm dubbed Solutions from the Start in partnership with donors such as the World Bank and African Development Bank.
When a crisis occurs, instead of setting up tent cities with food, education, healthcare, sanitation, and other necessary services, refugees are housed within existing communities, which have their infrastructure and facilities augmented by donor funding. Hospitals receive more doctors and beds; schools get more classrooms and teachers. Not only is it inclusive but it's also cost efficient, because it eliminates the need for expensive parallel systems. 'It enhances the existing facilities for nationals and also expands them to include refugees,' says Andrew Mbogori, UNHCR Representative for Ethiopia. 'This builds quite a lot in terms of cohesion between refugees and the host community.'
More than 70,000 Sudanese refugees fleeing the nation's civil war have been hosted among existing communities in Ethiopia's Benishangul-Gumuz region, as well as another 50,000 Somalis in its border region of Bokh. 'There are no parallel arrangements at all,' says Mbogori. 'It's an expansion of already existing [services], which is a win-win situation.'
However, integrating refugees and granting them rights remains politically sensitive. While donors are generally in favor of integrated communities, Mbogori says that the hardest challenge is getting governments on board. Drastic cuts to USAID—which had allocated $12.7 billion to sub-Saharan Africa in 2024, including 1.2 billion for Ethiopia—has spurred a growing realization that integrating displaced people and allowing them to contribute to the local economy can turn a perceived burden into a boon. 'When we see refugees, we should see opportunity,' says Mbogori. 'They can fend for themselves and come with a lot of skills.'
Faduma is no stranger to the challenges of displacement camps and scant legal status. Like many refugees, her story is complex. Although ethnically Somalian, her parents fled her homeland's civil war in 1992 to Yemen, entrusting their lives to people smugglers on board a boat that ended up spending 16 days at sea with no food and water. 'Many people died, including my cousin and grandma,' Faduma says. 'Afterwards, my parents had a really big phobia of boats.'
Which is why when Yemen's civil war broke out and the family decided to flee to Ethiopia, Faduma's mother insisted on flying. Aside from lumbering them with five years of debt, arriving into Addis Ababa Airport in 2014 brought other complications. After Houthi rebels seized control of the Yemeni capital Sanaa, it became impossible to retrieve educational certificates and other paperwork that codified their UNHCR refugee status.
And so, despite being safely ensconced in the Ethiopian capital, the quest for official documentation led the family to travel for three days over land to the Somalia border to present themselves as freshly arrived refugees. After a lengthy registration process, they were given ID cards and sent to a squalid displacement camp. It was quite the awakening. 'There was a donkey in our tent!' recalls Faduma. 'The place was unbelievable.'
In the end, a refugee whose son had just died allowed the family to stay in the extra tent that had been allotted for the funeral preparations. 'It was so cramped with all of us in there that if you fell asleep on one side you couldn't turn over,' recalls Faduma.
The family found the camp a frightening place, especially for eight women staying alone. 'Whenever we went to get water, people would chase us,' recalls Faduma. 'Men would tell my mom, 'You have a lot of girls, why don't you give us one of them, and then we can make things easy for you.''
Before long, the family decided to go back to Addis. However, leaving the camp meant they were no longer eligible to receive healthcare, education, and other services provided by the UNHCR. 'But our main purpose was to get the refugee card,' says Faduma. 'And the situation in the camp was miserable. So we went back to the city.'
Advocates for Solutions from the Start say another benefit of the scheme is that refugees are no longer beholden to camps for basic services. Moreover, providing refugees legal working status removes opportunities for exploitation and graft. Often in host countries with poor governance a gray economy emerges where undocumented migrants must bribe venal officials for documentation to live or work. Faduma herself worked for seven years teaching Arabic at a local school in Addis before receiving her Fayda ID.
'I never heard of a refugee who was refused a job because they didn't have a work permit,' says Faduma. 'But they might not pay you fairly and use the fact you are a refugee to make problems for you.'
In many places refugee populations are ostensibly permanent. The presumption that refugees move over borders for just a few weeks to escape some crisis then quickly return home is pollyannaish. The typical stay of refugees in Ethiopia is some 15 years, says Mbogori.
In southern Lebanon, almost half-a-million Palestinian refugees have lived in cramped displacement camps for decades, remaining largely stateless without access to public services while facing restrictions on employment and property ownership.
At Thailand's riparian border with Myanmar, at least 90,000 refugees have lived in nine camps under similar conditions since the early 1980s. 'Governments in Southeast Asia still look at refugees through a national security lens and have an extremely allergic reaction to any sort of integration into the local community,' says Phil Robertson, the Bangkok-based director of Asia Human Rights and Labour Advocates.
Objectors to refugee integration often talk about a 'magnet effect,' whereby making conditions easy for refugees will encourage more to arrive. And certainly there's a correlation between progressive policies and refugee numbers. Uganda, which operates an 'open door' policy for refugees including providing land and basic services, hosts 1.5 million displaced people, Africa's most.
But it's a question of perception whether displaced people are truly a burden or opportunity. Faduma says her success shows what can happen when people are given a chance. Whereas her previous life was essentially in limbo, waiting to be reunited with her father or married off, forging her own career has provided not only a sense of independence but also self-worth. 'If I really want to be free, I must depend on myself,' she says.
Other than painting and teaching art to local children, Faduma is in the process of setting up a local artistic center and community hub NGO, where refugees alongside locals can learn new skills and put on exhibitions and performances. The hope, she says, is to provide others with the same opportunities that turned her life around. 'I don't just want to survive,' Faduma says. 'I want everyone to be a survivor with me.'