The Sudan Handbook

126 thE sudan handbook

though the salaries are far from enough for their family needs. There

is considerable dependence on women. Some families subsist on only

one meal a day, cooked and served by women in the evening after they

are done with work. New arrivals use kinship networks as entry points

to the town. They live with relatives or kin groups, who may also help

them find work. This leads to ethnic concentration, as migrants of the

same ethnic group cluster together.

Networks of kinship are the main source of employment and social

protection. Migrants from Darfur, for example, are engaged in menial

activities like selling water, vegetables and fruit. Some young migrants

join the army and police although there are no reliable statistics on this.

Studies show that women selling food and tea are able to make more

money than men, although they risk harassment from male customers,

particularly as most do not have the necessary licenses from health and

tax authorities. In recent years refugees from Ethiopia and Eritrea have

competed with Sudanese women in income-earning activities such as tea

and food selling and domestic work as housemaids or nannies.

In 2003 Jabarona was among the first camps to be redesignated by

the city authorities as a regular neighbourhood. The idea was to bring

services and provide plots for residents on a legal basis. IDPs who

were living in Jabarona at the start of reorganization were given tags

to ascertain their eligibility for residential plots. The process of reorga-

nizing involved large-scale demolition. It started in November 2003; the

former camp was divided into twelve blocks, each containing about two

thousand plots. By the end of 2005, nine blocks had been surveyed and

organized. The process of reorganizing Jabarona involved bulldozing

thousands of mud-brick houses. Some 25,000 families applied for the

new government-allocated plots. Those who were residents in the camp

before 1997 were given priority over later arrivals. Of these families 11,000

could afford to pay plot fees and had the necessary documents – birth

certificates, a medical assessment of age, or ID cards. But thousands of

families who could not provide such documentation were excluded.

Poor migrants and IDPs living in settlements outside the official camps

The Sudan Handbook, edited by John Ryle, Justin Willis, Suliman Baldo and Jok Madut Jok. © 2011 Rift Valley Institute and contributors are not part of the programme of legalization of places like Jabarona.

(www.riftvalley.net).