Prostitution and Abuse: The Female Refugees Caught in Malawi’s Growing Refugee Camp
Weeping flows down Francine’s* face as she takes off her glove. Her dominant hand is covered by a discolored, patchy scarring. Her joints are stiff and unnaturally bent.
She resorted to sex work to support herself soon after she reached at Malawi’s Dzaleka refugee camp in 2015, having travelled there from Burundi.
On Christmas Eve in 2022, a customer declined payment. When she blocked the doorway, he took a very hot saucepan of beans and hurled it at her, injuring her hand and chest.
Life for refugees in Malawi has become increasingly hard, with financial decreases by international donors resulting in most consuming food only one time a day.
At the same time, the chances of moving to countries in the west have been diminished from small to remote.
I see other people going, who are in good health … I ask myself, ‘Why is it that I don’t get helped like others?’
After being abandoned by her mother, Francine lived in Burundi with an relative involved in politics, who was shot in 2014.
Haunted by her experiences, the adult mother of children aged two and nine believes her life would be at danger if she returned to Burundi.
She wonders why she has never been reviewed for relocation.
Malawi, one of the world’s least developed countries, has a tradition of welcoming refugees.
Dzaleka camp was built on the perimeter of the capital, Lilongwe, in 1994. The packed camp, which has become an shantytown, was designed to host 10,000 people.
Now, more than 58,000 refugees live there. About 60% of them are from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), from where up to 200 more arrive monthly.
Malawi’s “resettlement law” prevents refugees from staying officially or working outside Dzaleka, making them especially at risk to funding cuts.
Cash payments have been reduced to 50% of what is needed for food.
All of the years that we have been here, UNHCR has never thought about us
The financial strains have led to a increase in sex work, abuse at home cases and children theft.
Anne, a mother of seven, still helps and thinks that she sees four to six people of domestic violence a week, two times the number of two years ago.
Malawi is planning building a new camp near the Tanzanian border. However, Anne and other refugees say they want to stay in Dzaleka.
The government is also evaluating changing the law to allow refugees to work outside camps.
Judith fled Lubumbashi in the southern DRC in 2016, after gunmen killed her parents. Just 14, she was left looking after her three younger siblings.
She had to turn to sex work and has a four-year-old child with an man who left.
* Names have been changed to protect their identity
