General
Source: The Telegraph
The UN Refugee Agency is testing ground-breaking refugee camp shelters with solar lighting - the world's first - to help improve living conditions and reduce the risk of violence against women and children on camps.
To mark World Refugee Day, the UN Refugee Agency is working with a small non-governmental organisation and the IKEA Foundation to test an "innovative" shelter which uses solar lighting to help offer safety and security to women and children living in refugee camps.
In Syria over 1.3m refugees have fled the crisis in search of safety, pushing the number of refugees and those displaced by conflict to an 18 year-high of 45.2m, latest figures show. It is the highest figure since 1994, when people fled genocide in Rwanda and bloodshed in the former Yugoslavia.
Living standards
What is often overlooked is the living standards of the tens of thousands of refugees who are forced to live in makeshift camps - some for as many as 12 years.
Women and children are vulnerable to gender-based violence on refugee camps, with poor security tents and no lighting worsening the problem.
The prototype shelters, which have been over two years in the making, are designed to last several years - far longer than the tents currently used, which typically have a lifespan of only six months. In addition, they each have a renewable energy source, with solar lighting, and better ventilaition and security to help keep women and children safer.
Until now, no organisation has funded the testing or developing of better shelters because there has been little commercial drive behind it. The IKEA Foundation, the charitable subsidiary of the flat-pack furniture giant, set up the partnership between the NGO and the UN Refugee Agency in 2010 to address this issue. It has poured around £2m into the project and hopes to see the new shelters available for "mass production" from October this year.
The test tents are currently being used by Somali refugees living in UN refugee camps at Dollo Ado in Ethiopia, as well as refugees in Iraq and Lebanon. After receiving feedback from those who are using them, the IKEA Foundation will fund further improvements before they are put onto the market via the 'open source' method, where any commerical organisation can come along and buy the design, to sell to the UN Refugee Agency.
'Commercially viable'
A spokesman for the IKEA Foundation said it is hoping the UN Refugee Agency will place substantial orders for the new shelters, which if they are manufactured on a large scale, would help bring costs down and make them commercially viable. The shelters could end up in refugee camps all over the world.