Who We Serve
Humankind Academy
In January 2014, Humankind Academy opened, offering school spots to 71 students.
A majority of Humankind International’s early work was figuring out the need, and then the construction, equipping and staffing of HK Academy, an Early Childhood Centre in Dadaab.
The school expanded to a total of 150 students in January 2015. The children take two years of early education until they are able to enroll in primary schools.
The school has three classrooms, an additional room to act as an administrative office, training equipment for the three programs, an electrical generator and solar equipment to provide power. The school employs locals from the Dadaab area including the refugee camp, as headteacher, teachers, cooks, a custodian, and security guards. There is great need with many children waiting for spaces.
Who benefits from your generous donations and support:
150 children between the ages of 5 and 8 in the Dadaab Refugee Camps and the surrounding host community are benefiting from this project every year. The school is in the sub-camp Dagahaley (there are four other sub-camps: Hagardera, Ifo I and II, and Kambioos)
50 % of the children are refugees who don’t have access to early childhood education and the other 50% are from the host community who are living under worse conditions than refugees in camps; competition for resources between the refugees and the host community has many times led to conflict and violence.
About Dadaab
The three refugee camps of Dadaab, Kenya, Ifo, Dagahaley, and Hagardera are home to over 500,000 refugees, mostly from neighbouring Somalia. The camps are the site of a growing humanitarian crisis — first from a sharp increase in the number of new refugees arriving from Somalia, and a growing tension from the extremist militias from Somalia.
The three camps in Dadaab, Kenya; have housed refugees for over 18 years, starting with the flight of refugees from Somalia in 1991. Most of the people living in the camps — 97 percent — are Somali, though there are also refugees from Sudan, Uganda, the Congo and other countries in conflict. Many have lived in Dadaab for close to two decades, unable to return to homes still embroiled in chaos. In the past couple of years, increased violence in Somalia has led to a sharp influx of new refugees, as many as 1,000 a day in some cases, putting a heavy burden on resources already stretched thin by the existing population.