Malawi home to 30 000 refugees
Despite experiencing critical socio-economic challenges, Malawi remains one of the safest places for thousands of refugees running away from their countries’ conflicts.
Today, the country is harbouring around 30 000 refugees and asylum seekers who are living at Dzaleka Refugee Camp in Dowa and Luwani Camp in Neno, respectively.
There are thousands others living in transit shelters in some of the country’s boarder districts while hundreds others have been integrated into the local communities, mostly in urban areas of Blantyre, Lilongwe and Mzuzu.
mostly from East Africa
Public information associate for the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) in Malawi, Dorothy Kachitsa, said in an interview the country receives more than 100 new arrivals weekly.
Currently, Mwanza receives close to 30 new arrivals per week with Karonga welcoming about 84, according to Kachitsa.
Latest statistics indicate that there are 27 248 refugees and asylum seekers at Dzaleka Camp, the country’s biggest refugee camp, while Luwani has 2 254. Out of the 29,502 total number of refugees in the country, 13 991 are from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).
Dzaleka mostly gets new arrivals through Songwe and Mbilima border entry points in Northern Region, but lately, the UNHCR has registered other new arrivals from DRC through Mchinji border.
Meanwhile, the Ministry of Home Affairs and Internal Security, in collaboration with the UNHCR in Malawi, are conducting a registration and verification exercise of the refugees.
Kachitsa said the exercise, which ends on October 30 2016, is aimed at verifying the exact number of refugees and asylum seekers residing in Malawi. n
