Cities of Refuge and Return: Negotiating (Re)integration
Cities of Refuge and Return examines what it takes to rebuild a life after displacement in practice, not just on paper. It follows the LLEARN project across five East African cities — Bosaso, Kakuma, Aweil, Dessie, and Koboko — drawing on nearly 1,900 household surveys and community forums. Across seven episodes, the series asks where reintegration works, where it breaks down, and what it takes to close the gap. It is hosted by Mwara Namelok and produced by Samuel Hall for the LLEARN project, with funding from the EU through ICMPD.
Episodes
SITTING AT THE SAME TABLE
The final episode brings together everything the series has heard across five cities and asks what it adds up to. It revisits Naciimo, Maria, Ali, Mohammad, Belay, and James, and introduces the five pilot models that emerged from LLEARN's Participatory Forum process:
Bosaso's Local Financing and Service Accountability Model
Kakuma's Multilingual Service Access and Accountability Model
Aweil's W
Koboko - A PROGRESSIVE MODEL, BUT NOT WITHOUT GAPS
Koboko, a municipality in Uganda's West Nile region at the tri-border point with South Sudan and DRC, is the clearest evidence in five cities that locally led reintegration can genuinely work. Refugees and host community members call themselves Kobokians. Trust in local government sits at 75 percent across both populations. Schools, clinics, and markets are shared spaces. Koboko was the first muni
Dessie - FINDING A WAY
Dessie, the capital of South Wollo Zone in Ethiopia's Amhara region, is a city that has experienced displacement from multiple directions: it hosts IDPs from the Oromia–Amhara conflict, returnees forced back from Sudan after April 2023, and a host community that was itself briefly displaced when the northern Ethiopia war reached South Wollo in 2021. Three different relationships to displacement, c
Aweil - HOLDING ON AS THE CITY GROWS
Aweil, in Northern Bahr el Ghazal, South Sudan, is absorbing large numbers of returnees and displaced people in a town with limited infrastructure and systems not designed for the current scale of arrivals. Unlike many cities in this series, Aweil's challenge is not primarily social, the community is welcoming, chiefs open their compounds, neighbours share what they have. The challenge is structu
Kakuma - FROM CAMP TO CITY
Kakuma and Kalobeyei in Kenya's Turkana County are undergoing one of the most significant shifts in refugee governance in East Africa: the gradual conversion of a long-standing refugee camp into a fully recognised municipality. Kakuma has hosted refugees since 1992. Today, under Kenya's Refugee Act of 2021 and the Shirika Plan, it is officially in transition. But transition on paper and transition
Bosaso - A PORT OF ARRIVAL, A PLACE TO STAY?
Bosaso is the commercial capital of Puntland, Somalia, a port city shaped by trade, movement, and a long-standing reputation for open doors. This episode explores what reintegration looks like when a city's identity is built on arrival and transit, but its systems are not designed for people who stay.
Through Naciimo's story, a returnee from Yemen who came back to Bosaso in 2015, built a small
COMING BACK, STARTING AGAIN
Episode 1 of the Cities of Refuge and Return Podcast series sets the foundation. It introduces LLEARN -Local Leadership East Africa Return and Reintegration Network-, a research and action project working across five East African cities to understand and strengthen how reintegration actually works on the ground.
This episode explains what reintegration means in practice (economic, social, psychos
