Janemary Ruhundwa | 60 Years of Hosting Refugees: A Tanzanian Narrative

Janemary Ruhundwa in this interview traces Tanzania's refugee hosting record before independence and after unionization between Tanganyinka and Zanzibar to form Tanzania. She outlines three main phases in this national experience: the 1950s-1960s; the 1970s Burundian influx and the wave of refugees from the Congo, Burundi and Rwanda in the 1990s, appended by one final refugee wave in 2015. She argues that refugee-focused CSOs in Tanzania grew from the 1990s, through the operations of TCRSs, Caritas, and the Tanzanian Red Cross. In the 2000s, there was the addition of organizations such as NOLA, Dignity Kwanza, as refugee needs increasingly called for legal representation and education, capacity building of government officials, and general advocacy on refugee matters as interaction with local communities increased, away from the refugee services of the 1990s which focused on life saving services, food distribution, health, shelter, water sanitation, education, and camp management in general. Presently, due to government's policies favoring encampment, restrictionism and repatriations, many CSOs with expertise on fostering refugee self-reliance are likely to face operation challenges. She calls for more international collaboration and funding/logistical support in a framework ideally specified and regulated by the Tanzanian government.

Biography:
Ms Janemary Ruhundwa, the co-founder and currently the Executive Director at DIGNITY Kwanza, has over 13 years of experience in diverse areas, including refugee rights, nationality rights, migration and development, and NGO management. Before founding DIGNITY Kwanza, she served as the Country Director of Asylum Access Tanzania (AATZ), the then national office of Asylum Access, Assistant Protection Officer at UNHCR Tanzania, and An Assistant Lecturer at Tumaini University. She is currently the co-founder and the chair of the Tanzania Refugee and Migration Network (TAREMINET) and a member of the National Anti-Trafficking Committee.

Ms Ruhundwa holds an LLM and LLB from the University of Dar es Salaam, a Diploma in International Relations and Diplomacy from the Center for Foreign Relations, and a Human Rights Certificate from Malmo University (Sweden). She is a Tanganyika Law Society member, an Acumen Fellow 2014, and International Visitors Leadership Program and a TEDxIlala 2015 speaker. Ms Ruhundwa co-authored “Between a Rock and Hard Place – Urban Refugees in Tanzania” (published in the Africa law Today, Vol. 4, Issue 1 (2012)), and speaks in various national and international forums and provided opinions on issues on refugees, migration and statelessness in Tanzania. Ms Ruhundwa was also a lead counsel in the landmark case on citizenship rights.

For more information about Janemary Ruhunwa and her professional background visit:
https://carleton.ca/lerrn/people/jane...

In this video
00:00 Introduction
01:28 Decades of Action: Key Tanzanian CSOs in Refugee Support
05:31 A Surge in Support: Why Tanzanian CSOs Grew in the Late 2000s
08:01 Areas of Focus: How Tanzanian CSOs Assist Refugees
12:22 Current State of CSO-Government Relations in Tanzania
14:03 Impact of Tanzanian CSOs on Refugee Protection
17:03 International NGO Withdrawal: Reasons and Implications
17:35 Government Funding for Local CSOs in Tanzania
21:04 What is the Tanzanian government's stance on funding local CSOs?
22:19 Optimizing Government Engagement with CSOs

Edited by Beatrice Villadelgado