Focus on Arts and Ecology

Some have migrated from the Valparaíso region, but others have organised to remain in the face of advancing forest fires. 

By Muriel Alarcón, May 22, 2026

Carmen Mardones first began to call Canal Chacao home when she was 29. Set among the hills of Quilpué, the neighbourhood offered a life closer to the forest with their two young children: Kattya, four, and Jorge, two. Catalina, their third, was born after they had made the move, in 1997, from the nearby coastal city of Viña del Mar.

At first, she rented. Over time, she bought a house and spent years fixing it up. She continued to work in Viña del Mar, selling automobile parts in a business she had inherited from her father. She built a life.

Then came the great fire of 2-3 February 2024 – the deadliest in Chile’s recent history, killing 138 people and affecting more than 21,000, according to government figures. She remembers the day. She remembers how a black cloud settled over their homes. Sirens wailed, gas pipes exploded, and smoke filled every space. The water was cut off.

She evacuated with her husband and youngest daughter, damp towels pressed to their faces because the air was unbreathable and the flames were everywhere. They got into the car, and for a while, left the fire behind. Still, she did not leave.

Mardones left two weeks later – after days of clearing away earth and burnt debris, and listening to the sound of the neighbour across the street crying. “I just wanted to stop seeing everything destroyed every day,” she said. What hurt the most, was “losing the history of each family”. “It does you a world of harm. It gives you no hope.”

She isn’t alone. Mardones’ decision is part of an issue drawing increased attention. Between 2016 and 2022, nearly 39,000 people were forced to leave their homes due to a weather event or to avoid its effects. Earthquakes accounted for 41% of these displacements, followed by forest fires (30.8%), floods (17.4%), extreme temperatures (6.4%) and landslides (3.3%). More recently, nearly 50,000 people were evacuated in a matter of hours after wildfires stuck southern Chile in January 2026, shows data from the National Service for Disaster Prevention and Response (Senapred).

In Canal Chacao, that vulnerability was part of the everyday. The neighbourhood sits on a strip of land where the town meets the forest. Summer fires, Mardones said, “were relatively normal”. They would last an hour, and residents knew what to do: Mardones would run hoses and soak her roof till they subsided.

Until February 2024, normal had not meant this. It had not meant a fire driven by fierce winds that refused to subside. And it had not meant the heartbreaking question: should they stay or should they go?

Preparing for disaster

One year before the February 2024 fire, some residents began to organise themselves to prepare for disaster. The Canal Chacao area comprises around 1,400 homes, spread across the neighbourhoods of Canal Chacao itself, Villa Botania, Cumbres de Quilpué and Bello Horizonte, where some 12,600 people live. In 2023, they founded the Canal Chacao Association, with 12 people on its board.

The urgency had been building for years. In 2014, the Great Valparaíso Fire had destroyed 2,900 homes and affected 12,500 people. Across the region, increasing heatwaves and strong winds renewed the pressure every summer. And there was no faith in the state’s early warning systems, explains Estrella Barrios, a member of the association’s board. “There was a lack of trust in the authorities, who are supposed to protect us, but don’t arrive on time,” she says.

Latin America has become one of the epicentres of the global climate crisis. UN climate science body the IPCC says the region is experiencing warming, and an increased frequency of droughts and other extreme weather events. “Central and South America are highly exposed, vulnerable and strongly impacted by climate change”, it states. The situation is “amplified by inequality, poverty, population growth and high population density, land use change particularly deforestation with the consequent biodiversity loss, soil degradation, and high dependence of national and local economies on natural resources for the production of commodities”.

The members of the Canal Chacao Association knew they had to act. In 2023, they began participating in training sessions organised by Caritas Chile, a Catholic aid organisation, in partnership with the National Forestry Corporation (Conaf) and the Quilpué municipal government. The five-month programme focused on understanding the local environment – its strengths, risks and vulnerabilities – as well as the resources available within the community. Conaf provided the more technical information: regulations, what can or cannot be pruned, and protected species. They even set up a command centre, complete with a computer and printer for administrative work, as well as tools like brush cutters, wheelbarrows, rakes, radio equipment and a camera to document their activities.

“Communities that feel frightened and abandoned by the state often want to go and tackle the fire themselves,” says Andalucía Corvalán, a specialist in community disaster risk management at Caritas Chile. “Part of the project’s transformation process was to explain that the community’s role is prevention too.”

In the months that followed, the group put that training into practice. By January 2024, they had cleared areas with dense vegetation, built firebreaks by removing vegetation from residential zones, pressured the local council to install water tanks to dampen areas exposed to high temperatures, and planted doca (Carpobrotus chilensis), a succulent that acts as a natural defence against fires. They designed a community risk map identifying, among others, older people and those with reduced mobility who would need help evacuating.

When the fire came, it was these actions that helped save lives. The clearing and brush removal helped keep roads open and access routes unobstructed. Barrios said that the community knew not to head towards the fire, so as not to hinder the work of firefighters. 

In nearby Villa Independencia, the destruction was far greater and the death toll significantly higher. Estimates suggest that around 60 people died there. In Canal Chacao, the death toll was seven. “Chile has a serious shortage of resilient infrastructure. So when the great fire came, the population had no defined excavation routes. In Canal Chacao, people knew the area and how it worked,” says Sofía Jacob, a researcher on disaster displacement at the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences (Flacso).

One of those who lost their life was a voice that had been warning of the risks. Months earlier, the Canal Chacao Association had hit a wall during their training: public land could be cleared of weeds, but adjacent private land was beyond their remit. Carmen Mardones’ home bordered a privately owned forest, and her neighbour, Delia Uribe, an octogenarian who was a member of the Canal Chacao Association, had warned of the need to clear it, Barrios said. “She told us literally: ‘If the forest catches fire, I’m going to burn to death’”.

When the fire came, and raged through the weeds, Uribe refused to evacuate, choosing to stay with her husband who had previously suffered a stroke. Today, the Canal Chacao Association meets at a command centre named after her: Delia Uribe.

Living with the fire

Though she was aware of the association’s resilience work, Mardones did not take part in their training sessions in 2023. Her job made it impossible. “Retail hours are quite demanding,” she says.

And yet, she has never doubted that leaving was the right decision. Staying was taking a psychological toll. In the days after the fire, her husband refused to leave the ruins of their home. He slept inside the car, in the garage, and watered the remains every day. “I was afraid he would be left with trauma. That is why I decided to leave, and go far away,” she says about the decision to move to Limache, another inland city in the region.

For Jacob, community preparedness efforts like those in Canal Chacao can help reduce distrust and, in turn, displacement. The decision to leave is rarely triggered by a specific moment, she says, but by a continuum of factors which build up in the months or years before. “Without environmental education, there is no resilience,” she says.

In Canal Chacao, residents now have portable radios connected to Senapred and the Fire Service. They watch weather data closely and analyse it to anticipate the behaviour of fires. Given the uncertainty about authorities issuing timely alerts, they can initiate an evacuation themselves. “If we see the situation is unfavourable, we issue the first warning through a WhatsApp group made up of community members and managed by the Canal Chacao Association,” explains Barrios. They now hope to implement a third lever of alert using an emergency siren. “That’s what we still have pending,” Barrios adds.

Much of the challenge ahead is financial: USAID funding that enabled them to acquire basic equipment is now gone. “It stopped providing funding,” Barrios says. The group now applies to different funding sources, with some limited success – they recently bought some chainsaws, and a drone is next on the agenda.

Mardones, on her part, still visits Canal Chacao where her former neighbours still live. The house she left behind was demolished and later rebuilt with support from the social organisation Desafío Levantemos. It is now home for her son Jorge, 31, his partner, and her daughter Catalina, now 23.

“It’s beautiful now,” she says.

And yet, she still feels afraid for her children. She knows they live with the burden that they must always be prepared, and always at the ready; caught between leaving and staying. “Before, it never even crossed our minds that Canal Chacao could burn. Now, I think it could happen again.”

Muriel Alarcón

Millions of Afghans forced back across the border are returning to a country where conflict, climate and hardship make rebuilding fragile from the start. 

By Farahnaz Zahidi Moazzam, May 20, 2026

In Pakistan, Khoja Gul was a businessman. He is Afghan, but like many around him, he moved across the border as a young man. There, he dealt in plastic scrap and owned a warehouse. He has a wife and eight children, and in his own words, they were “doing well in life.” Then, as the relationship between Pakistan and Afghanistan soured, the precarious life they had built collapsed around them.

They came home. Except the word home can mean many things, and for Gul it brings no comfort. Home means all ten of them squeezed together in a shanty in Kabul. “I have no job. No money. I barely manage to pay rent for my family. I have nothing.”

More than five million Afghans have returned to Afghanistan since the end of 2023, around 10% of the country’s population. Nearly three million came back in 2025 alone, two-thirds from Iran and one-third from Pakistan, said Charlie Goodlake, head of external relations for the UN refugee agency UNHCR. “For many Afghans, there are no good options – not in Iran, not in Pakistan, and not upon return,” he added.

The circumstances of their move are often difficult to discuss openly, when their legal status, family security and future mobility remain uncertain. Pakistan’s government has given several reasons for the mass repatriation of Afghans under its Illegal Foreigners Repatriation Plan – national security, economic stability and legal regulation. From Iran, Afghans have fled in search of safety from escalating hostilities.

For Gul and his family, the question is not just leaving or arriving. It is what they are returning to. When they came back, they found themselves in the throes of a winter so severe it left 61 people dead in three days. “We suffered in the rains. We did not even have bedding or blankets. It was only our gawandi (neighbour) who gave us some out of kindness,” he said.

Afghanistan has seen four decades of armed conflict, and it is also one of the world’s most vulnerable countries to climate change. For displaced people on both sides of the Durand Line that means the violence of conflict is compounded by climatic extremes, said Hafiz Abdul Qadeem Abrar, spokesperson for the International Rescue Committee (IRC) Afghanistan. “Frost waves, floods, and now the expected heatwaves in the summer,” he added.

When returnees first make their way across a volatile border, they are brought to camps, where they receive an initial medical assessment and treatment, some food, shelter and necessities. But the influx is incessant, and they are soon encouraged to go to their native areas. “IRC in collaboration with the government is giving both awareness and aid to refugees, especially about how to survive in a harsh climate. But no matter how much is done, it is never enough. Women and children suffer the most; they are lost without a home,” Abrar said.

What they return to is not stability. It is a country ravaged by conflict and natural disasters – floods, prolonged drought, repeated crop losses. Destruction so profound, that there is mass internal displacement.

Maisam Shafiey, advocacy manager for the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) Afghanistan, said: “Many families in Badghis [province] have been forced to leave their homes due to drought and the loss of their livelihoods, relocating to Herat. On the other hand, the devastating earthquake in eastern Afghanistan [last year] displaced thousands of people, forcing many to live in informal settlements and leaving them in urgent need of humanitarian assistance.”

The earthquake affected areas hosting many recent returnees, said Charlie Goodlake. “Many had only just returned and were trying to rebuild their lives. Some families have now experienced triple displacement – first to Pakistan or Iran, then back to Afghanistan, and then displaced again within the country.”

“It is not that civil society isn’t helping. But barely a quarter will be able to get the full support they need. The people (who need assistance) are simply too many.”

Coming home as a stranger

Shahtaj (name changed) is still getting used to Kabul. He didn’t grow up in Kabul. He wasn’t even born in Kabul.

His parents moved from Afghanistan to Pakistan in the late 1970s, where he was born some years later. He grew up with the many stories about the difficulties they faced; with a tangled sense of identity – never knowing what he could really call home. “Growing up outside one’s homeland affects the way one sees identity, belonging and security. No matter what you do, and no matter how long you live in another country, you are still seen as an alien, a foreigner. That feeling stays with you,” Shahtaj said.

That feeling, that uncertainty in the pit of the stomach, did not leave when he and his family took the decision to return to Afghanistan. Here too, he felt like an outsider. “Coming to a country where I had never lived before, everything seemed new and different. Although Afghanistan was my homeland by origin, in practical terms, it was still unfamiliar to me. That made the process of settling back difficult,” Shahtaj said.

“When we speak to people at the border, the challenges they describe are layered and complex,” Goodlake said. “Some were not even born in Afghanistan. Others, returning after decades, face deep social and cultural readjustments.”

And yet, estrangement doesn’t come only from violence or the feeling of not belonging. It is sharpened by the real, visceral, tangible effects of climate extremes that make difficult lives harder still. When Maria Patel, for instance, founder of TheDisplacement.com, visited the oldest Afghan camp in Karachi in May 2025, she discovered that refugees had been asked to evacuate the area in a matter of months. By September, they were all gone. “When I asked them how the climate has impacted their lives in Pakistan, they said that since they live in temporary settlements, they face long hours of load-shedding which becomes unbearable during heatwaves. The drainage is improper which means flooding during the rain, and children fall in them when they are playing,” Patel shared.

The settlements were temporary, and often, roofs would collapse or walls would be torn down in the torrential rain. “On top of all this, they feared that upon their return to Afghanistan, they will have to live in camps, in unknown terrain, and wondered how they would navigate such climatic conditions,” Patel said.

Some refuse to return. When Dr Maryam (name changed) left Afghanistan as the Taliban regained control of the country a few years ago, she was in her 50s, a respected gynaecologist with an illustrious career and a comfortable life. She left everything behind except her family, and some valuables worth USD 100. “For a woman, her home is everything. But I am happy in Pakistan. At least I am safe here,” she said.

But as a woman and a doctor, Maryam worries for those making arduous journeys across international boundaries. “Private hospitals don’t admit refugees unless we have proper documents which in most cases we don’t,” she said. “And in camps and shelters, severe winters or floods take their toll on pregnant women and children.”

In Patel’s experience during her research on refugees, she found that women were fighting acute mental health challenges, often helpless in the face of harassment but unable to file complaints. “Advocate Umer Gilani stepped in to help them by setting up a hotline. But still there was a lot of work which needed to be done and that’s when I set up TheDisplacement.com where I also penned down a policy brief catering for people displaced by climate and conflict,” said Patel.

The next displacement

It is clear Afghanistan needs help, relief workers on the ground say.

The need for humanitarian assistance in the country was already projected to reach around 22 million people in 2026, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). But Shafiey, of NRC Afghanistan, believes the situation is deteriorating even further with the return of millions of Afghans from neighbouring countries, the displacement of thousands, and the natural disasters that force families to live in the open or informal settings.

“These overlapping crises are significantly increasing needs and require urgent international attention and scaled up funding,” Shafiey said. “We call on the international community to honour and fully deliver on their pledges to Afghanistan, particularly in support of the Humanitarian Needs and Response Plan (HNRP). In 2025, only 41.7% of the pledged funding was met, leaving critical gaps in life-saving assistance for millions in need.”

Imran Khan, former country director of the US Institute of Peace, said attention has been drawn away from the situation in Afghanistan by burgeoning conflict elsewhere – such as the humanitarian crisis in Gaza or the Iran-US-Israel war. “In Washington DC or London or Geneva, policymakers must not have the time to come up with ideas for Afghan refugees. And under the global leadership of President Trump, the climate change agenda has suffered irreparable damage,” he said.

Given this context, Khan said there was little hope that the “world elites” would come to the rescue of Afghan refugees. “Even Pakistan has changed its policy of being a refuge. It’s calculus primarily shifted after 2023 when the Afghan Taliban came to power. Pakistani policymakers accuse the government in Kabul of taking actions against Pakistani security forces and civilians in the last two years,” he said.

But while he understood why Islamabad felt compelled to act, Khan said the move had forsaken Afghan refugees who had lived in Pakistan for decades. “Afghanistan is still far from stable and safe, and many regions have been deeply impacted by the effects of climate change. I think the UN and international community hasn’t been proactive on this issue. Pakistan has little support or incentive to keep hosting millions of Afghans, other than a moral imperative.”

For Charlie Goodlake, the case for support is simple: to ensure return is a “moment of hope, not the start of another cycle of displacement.”

Because there are occasions when Shahtaj in Kabul feels like he is teetering on the brink of another tectonic decision: to become a climate and conflict migrant for the third time. He often sits and weighs the costs; costs he knows well. “Migration will lead to our cultural erosion. Second or third generation migrants grow up with a weaker connection to our customs, our ways of life, our languages,” Shahtaj worries.

And yet, it is a decision he is forced to consider. “It is an unfortunate thought, but it is a real one. Migration has affected more than one generation in my family. I had hoped that this cycle would end with us,” Shahtaj said.

“But there are times when it feels inevitable, because Afghanistan’s trials are not over yet.”

Refugees in Kenya’s Kakuma camp have fled war, raids and persecution. But even in a place of safety, life must be rebuilt again and again. 

By Brian Obara, May 18, 2026

He almost whispers into the phone: “Jambo la kwanza ni uhai” – the first thing is life.

It was March 2018 in Oronyo, a village in South Sudan. Thomas Kisario Mariano was 18 years old. As was routine, his family – his parents, his four brothers and three sisters – had spent the day out in the fields farming. They came back home and found that all their cows were gone. “For us, cattle were everything.”

Everyone in the house was crying. It was far from safe. His father calmed the family down, and in the morning, they left for Torit, the closest town in Eastern Equatoria state. A week later, his father told them that without the cattle, there was no way he could keep taking care of them.

For Mariano, the theft was when home stopped feeling secure. He had to leave. “Some steal. Some raid,” he said. “There were cattle raiders, and there was civil war. The country was just not peaceful.”

His siblings were taken to Uganda. As a young man, Mariano made his own way, following the path of an older relative who had made a similar journey towards Kenya. Eventually he arrived at the border near Nadapal. And with a group, he waited until the UN refugee agency came to get him.

They took him to Kakuma, one of the world’s largest refugee camps.

Less a single camp than an aggregation of settlements, Kakuma was established in 1992 after civil war drove thousands of young boys from their families and villages in southern Sudan. Most still under 10, some fled to Ethiopia to escape death or induction into guerilla armies; others walked more than a thousand miles to reach Kakuma. Some died on the way. Those that lived came to be known as the Lost Boys of Sudan.

Today, Kakuma has expanded into multiple zones, including the newer Kalobeyei settlement. Together, as of 31 March 2026, Kakuma and Kalobeyei host 313,247 refugees and asylum seekers, according to the UN refugee agency. Most come from South Sudan, Somalia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Burundi, Ethiopia and Sudan.

The numbers tell only part of the story.

In East Africa, displacement is increasingly shaped not by a single emergency but by several layered on top of one another. War and political instability. But also, extreme weather made worse by climate change. In Somalia for instance, an estimated 211,000 people were displaced in the three months from October to December 2025. The causes were drought (52%), conflict (44%) and flooding (4%). Across sub-Saharan Africa, internal displacement had reached a record 38.8 million people by the end of 2024.

The Kakuma settlement is often described as a place of asylum. But for many families who flee war and conflict, refuge does not mean the end of instability. They find themselves at risk of being displaced again by flood, heat or the collapse of basic support. Safety can mean learning to endure a different set of pressures.

For Mariano, it is still worth the cost. Because “safety comes before everything”, he said. “Before cattle. Before land. Before food. Before all plans. You can make plans. You can work. But someone can come and take over everything.”

“The first thing is life.”

When safety is not stability

Mwanaidi Nerima is a protection assistant with Kenya’s Department of Refugee Services in Kakuma. She works on the front lines of asylum reception, among the officials who first meet people like Mariano when they arrive. The pressure is not only the number of people coming in, but their condition.

“Yesterday, we received someone with a gunshot wound. He was shot in Jonglei state. While receiving him, we notified Kenya Red Cross and International Red Cross that we have a gunshot-wound refugee. He was attended to at the hospital,” she said.

The tide of people ebbs and flows, but it never stops. “From November to early January, we were receiving an influx from Sudan and South Sudan. Maybe close to 200 per day. Yesterday [22 April 2026] we had 14 – five families from South Sudan and one family from Congo.” Is there ever a day no one arrives? Nerima almost laughs in response. “No, no, no.”

Once they are past Nerima, refugees must begin to reckon with a new set of challenges.

“While conflict was the main reason for my displacement, environmental challenges and climate change have continued to shape my experience in Kakuma,” Manahil Musa, a Sudanese refugee, told Dialogue Earth. Now an educator and social entrepreneur who co-founded the Blossoms of Hope initiative, Musa has spent 18 years of her life navigating Kakuma’s unpaved bylanes. “Life in Kakuma is not easy,” she said.

Access to quality education, healthcare and employment opportunities is not always guaranteed, she said, and many people live with the weight of displacement and trauma. When it rains, the flooding contaminates drinking water, and electricity becomes unreliable.

During teaching sessions, heavy rains cause the streams near her educational centre to overflow. Some students come late, others leave early, and some don’t come at all. “Even for those present, it is hard to concentrate because of the conditions. It impacts attendance, participation and the overall learning experience,” she said.

What Musa is describing is not an anomaly but a clear pattern. The camp sits in a landscape defined by extremes; long stretches of heat and dust, interrupted by sudden, often overwhelming rain. In recent years, those swings have sharpened. Dry seasons linger. Then, when the rains come, they arrive with force. The result is what development experts and meteorologists are calling “drought-to-deluge”.

Between the two, life becomes a matter of constant recalibration for refugees.

Shadrack Kiprono, a project advisor on humanitarian energy access at SNV, the Dutch development organisation, said: “Drought increases the need for irrigation, water pumping, cooling systems and refrigeration, all of which depend on energy. Water pumping is expensive. Small shops need refrigeration. Medicines need cooling. Vegetables sourced from far away need preserving. For people trying to diversify their livelihoods, everything becomes more difficult.”

When Thomas Kisorio Mariano first arrived in Kakuma, he was registered as size one – alone. “A single person could not be given a household, so they paired two people together. I was housed with a woman from Toposa,” he said. Then, in 2022, the floods came. “There is a small river called Tarach. When rain comes, it carries away entire houses. It carried away ours,” he said.

A house he had called home for four years, swept away by the raging river. “Sometimes there is drought. Sometimes there are floods. There is not much help. We were relocated to Kalobeyei and given a tent. We had to rebuild with the pieces we salvaged.”

Self-reliance without the means

Avril Ndambwe Shabani’s working life is organised around bees. For the past seven years, he has run Kakuma Bee Social Enterprise Limited, a refugee-led business that produces and sells honey and other bee products while supporting local beekeepers and farmers in Kakuma. “I fled ethnic and tribal conflict in my country, Democratic Republic of the Congo, in 2013. I had just completed my university studies then. It has taken me seven years to build my business,” Shabani said.

Shabani’s entrepreneurial spirit leans into what authorities in Kakuma are now increasingly encouraging: self-reliance and integration. Kiprono, for instance, says SNV’s work aims to support both refugees and host communities as users and suppliers of clean-energy technologies. Refugees manufacture improved cookstoves and briquettes, sell solar products and use solar panels in restaurants, shops and other businesses. Some 500 people, he says, have found work along these supply chains.

None of this comes without challenges and entrepreneurs like Shabani encounter structural exclusion often. “As a refugee, accessing loans from banks is challenging even when you have a good banking record. Travel outside the camp requires official documents that are hard to obtain, and these barriers limit both business growth and economic opportunities,” Shabani said.

And then there is climate. The impact on beekeeping, he says, is direct. “During drought, there are fewer flowering plants, so bees struggle to find nectar and pollen. This leads to reduced honey production, weaker colonies, and sometimes even the loss or migration of bees. During periods of heavy rain or flooding, vegetation can be destroyed, hives damaged, and activity disrupted,” Shabani said.

The national policy direction, meanwhile, is also towards self-reliance and integration. Kenya’s Shirika plan, launched in 2025, aims to turn camps such as Kakuma and Dadaab into integrated settlements linked to county systems and national services. Nerima said this government plan deals “mainly with socio-economic inclusion for refugees and the host community. It shifts the mindset from humanitarian assistance to socio-economic empowerment for sustainable development.”

The full plan shows that climate is not only one of its action areas, but part of the pressure the plan is trying to respond to. It states that Kenya’s “severe climatic changes” have increased in frequency and intensity. Shrinking grazing areas, drought and ecological decline have escalated land degradation, it says.

“Recognising the increasing pressures that climate change places on natural resources, the plan emphasises environmentally sustainable practices to mitigate environmental degradation and build long-term resilience,” the text reads.

It mentions initiatives to restore degraded land through tree planting and improve agricultural productivity via water conservation techniques, as well as “the adoption of climate-smart farming practices to enhance food security for refugees and host communities.”

The move towards integration is taking place in a world where humanitarian support is shrinking, with Kakuma exposed to shocks far beyond East Africa. The World Food Programme (WFP) said in May 2025 that around 720,000 refugees in Kenya would receive only 28% of their food ration from June unless new funding arrived. The situation had not improved by August, when WFP cut aid by 80% for those with income and by 60% for vulnerable groups, including pregnant women and disabled people, Al Jazeera reported.

And now, with the Iran war disrupting food and medicine supply chains to sub-Saharan Africa, aid organisations have called for a humanitarian corridor through the Strait of Hormuz.

For Shabani, while the transition towards self-reliance is important, many still lack support systems to sustain themselves. “There are still clear gaps, especially for those expected to be self-reliant without sufficient resources,” Shabani said.

And yet, for Thomas Kisario Mariano, even this precarity is preferable to return. He refuses to think of South Sudan as home anymore. “People do not always understand what trauma stays with you. Even remembering brings pain,” he said.

He has visited because his parents still live there. But it is in Kakuma that he has built a life, however fragile, that is his own. That tension, between a deep and troubled attachment to home and the hard reality that makes permanent return impossible, is one many refugees live with. Fellow refugee Musa, who is from Sudan, says: “While hope may remain in the heart, there is also a need to build a life where one is.”

Mariano’s life in Kakuma now includes four children – three daughters and a son. “And honestly, I don’t hope for them to grow up back home. Because there, people lose too much. You can lose your life,” he said.

“Jambo la kwanza ni uhai – the first thing is life.”

Note: The UNHCR images featured above may be republished as part of this article, following the terms of Dialogue Earth’s Creative Commons licence.

Africa is a growing market for China’s solar power exports, helped by organisations bridging information gaps and identifying opportunities. 

By Jiang Mengnan, May 11, 2026

In a Beijing exhibition hall last autumn, representatives from several Chinese firms talked with government officials and businesspeople from 16 African countries. They discussed off-grid solar, clean stoves, electric mobility. What options are available, they probed, and how would they work on the ground?

The event was part of a programme to encourage business matchmaking, technology showcasing and skills transfer – known as the South-South Cooperation Renewables Centre.

Efforts like this one, which was founded by industry body the China Renewable Energy Industries Association (CREIA), are a feature of a new phase in China’s renewables sector exports. Sales to emerging markets grew last year, while to the EU and US they fell, noted China Energy News. Solar panel exports to Africa rose by 17%.

Factors behind the shift include policies on China-Africa cooperation, rapidly growing demand for energy in Africa and increasing protectionism in conventional export destinations. Meanwhile, industry associations and research organisations are helping turn potential opportunities into actual plans.

The renewables centre programme is a key part of the China-Africa Renewable Energy Partnership, which was formed in 2024 by Chinese, Kenyan, Ethiopian and Rwandan industry associations, with support from the World Resources Institute (WRI). The partnership’s aims are very ambitious, states CGTN Africa, including to “revolutionise energy access across the continent”, support local businesses via affordable energy solutions, and create green tech jobs.

Dialogue Earth spoke to Chinese and African officials to find out more about the form cooperation is taking.

Africa demands, China supplies

CREIA is a founding member of the partnership. Li Dan, the association’s secretary-general, says that unlike developed economies, which face an expensive process of dismantling established fossil-fuel energy systems, many parts of Africa are in effect starting fresh: “Africa doesn’t need to follow the same path of polluting first then cleaning up later. It can skip that stage, leapfrogging directly to distributed solar and energy storage.”

Rugare Mukanganga, a Zimbabwe-based analyst for international consultancy Development Reimagined, agrees. He tells Dialogue Earth that expansion of manufacturing and industry on the continent means more demand for energy: “Plugging these energy gaps will be critical. Why not prioritise renewables, clean energy technology, as well as climate-friendly infrastructure, given their increasingly competitive price points?”

Li Dan explains that CREIA first started looking at how to promote China-Africa cooperation on energy in 2022, at the COP27 climate negotiations in Egypt. It was then that the organisation saw energy demand it knew China could help meet.

However, working together isn’t a simple process of finding a supply to meet a demand. Li Dan says that in many African contexts the basic conditions which allow a market to operate are lacking. “At certain stages of development, the most advanced technology isn’t necessarily the best choice. It may be too expensive, or the necessary infrastructure might not be there.” She explained that Chinese companies can supply a variety of products and solutions – but matching these accurately to local need in Africa requires communication and coordination.

Doing so was an important reason for starting the China-Africa Renewable Energy Partnership, which WRI worked with local and international partners to design and set up. Zhang Cheng, a research associate with WRI’s Sustainable Transition Center, explains that China’s 2021 pledge to stop building new coal power plants overseas spurred the energy industry to look for greener opportunities. Africa was identified as a market with potential but also many obstacles. “Given this,” he says, “it would be inefficient for companies to work alone to try and find markets. A platform is needed to reduce uncertainties.”

Filling the information gap

In international investment, accurate information is essential.

Many people don’t realise that there are big differences in how African countries get their energy, and how they set their priorities, says Rugare Mukanganga. “Already, about 20 get more than half their electricity from renewables. That makes the energy transition much less pressing than it is for the remaining 35.” Chinese companies need to understand local circumstances so they can make the correct calls on what to offer.

The partnership is currently compiling information for a quarterly bulletin for Chinese firms and investors – tracking policy changes, industry news and the investment environment in Kenya, Rwanda and Ethiopia. The partnership is also organising regular trips to Africa for Chinese firms so they can meet local counterparts and project managers.

This is, to some extent, changing minds. Li Dan told Dialogue Earth some Chinese firms had assumed they would need to sell their renewable generation products at rock-bottom prices. But they soon learned industrial and commercial electricity users in Kenya and Rwanda were paying the equivalent of CNY 1.50-2.00 (USD 0.22-0.29) for a kilowatt-hour, significantly more than in China, indicating greater purchasing power than anticipated. Also, some private companies are more creditworthy than government bodies, meaning Chinese firms are able to find reliable business partners. This information has affected the decisions Chinese companies make when setting prices and product offerings.

Africa, meanwhile, is learning more about what China has to offer. Yemissirach Sisay is chair of the Ethiopian Solar Energy Development Association, a founding member of the partnership. She told Dialogue Earth that most solar power equipment in Ethiopia is sourced from China and that Chinese firms there tend to work alone. One of the aims of the partnership is to bring those companies together to identify common problems and promote links with local industry.

At the event in Beijing, representatives from Africa were presented with a wide range of clean energy solutions: solar + agriculture, virtual power plants, vehicle-to-grid models. “Some participants told us the shift from a single use [application context] to [system-wide] implementation … made them reconsider how their own local systems could develop”, says Lu Lisha, CREIA’s head of international cooperation.

“In the future, we hope the centre will feature case studies from the South, not just from China. That would be real South-South cooperation and expand the scope of communication,” she says.

The right tech and skills for the right place

Partner countries are often very keen on skills and technology transfer. This means foreign firms sharing knowledge and technical capabilities, enabling local firms to use and eventually develop similar tech independently. Yemissirach Sisay and Rugare Mukanganga both point to a lack of skilled technicians in their countries.

The partnership is trying to facilitate its partner organisations improving the situation. Zhang Cheng gave Dialogue Earth the example of Chinese company Beijing Henghua, which has set up a vocational school, Forever TVET, to train local technicians in Rwanda. The school offers courses on renewable energy and has a demonstration 44-kilowatt solar power station. Students acquire skills in electrical engineering as well as power plant management and maintenance, and the local area can use the station’s electricity.

Zhang Cheng says this has also allowed localised applications to develop. The project set up a battery swap station for electric motorcycles, to allow riders to make longer journeys. This model meets local market demand and makes it more likely Chinese technology will find sustainable use cases.

However, technologies are harder to transfer than skills. Li Dan highlighted the challenges arising from isolated supply chains. Despite calls for the industry to become fully localised, the markets might not be big enough, she notes: “The aluminium produced in China isn’t just used to make solar panels. It’s used in infrastructure, in vehicle-manufacturing … If you don’t have a big enough market to support aluminium making, it’s not realistic to set it up just to make solar panels.”

Rugare Mukanganga thinks moving from “assembled in Africa” to “made in Africa” will require a “nurturing” and start-up-friendly policy environment. That could be provided directly by national governments or by harmonisation of policies across different countries. To promote these efforts, industry bodies will need to talk to those governments, he says.

Funding problems

Finance is always an issue in international development and energy transition projects. Zhang Cheng says investing in Africa is made harder by exchange-rate instability, opaque policy environments and unclear rules around how and when investors can exit projects and take their money home.

“High costs of capital get in the way of many growth opportunities across the continent,” says Rugare Mukanganga. Most of the funding available comes on commercial terms, typically involving higher borrowing costs and limited risk-sharing. This can weaken the business case for local manufacturing and reduce project viability, he added.

Yemissirach Sisay mentioned the obstacles in Africa faced by international money, meaning commercial investment and development finance. On one hand, foreign donors worry that instead of supporting local manufacturing, their funds will flow to more capable Chinese contractors. On the other, institutions such as the World Bank have set high thresholds for access to funds, meaning local small and medium-sized enterprises hoping for funding may be shut out.

In response, the members of the partnership have proposed a new financing system. Zhang Cheng thinks hybrid financing could play a role: public or charitable money would underwrite the project and get it through the initial risks, and so leverage larger private investments.

It’s also necessary to make projects more “bankable”, says Li Dan. She points out that turning Africa’s huge demand for energy into commercially viable projects requires systematic capacity building covering project design, risk assessments and commercial models that are profitable and sustainable.

Rugare Mukanganga says African start-ups need long-term funding, not short-term money in search of a quick profit. That “patient” money should be thinking in terms of fostering an industry, rather than simply evaluating risk and return. He thinks more cooperation between African- and Chinese-led multilateral financial institutions is important. “The pool of available funding could be expanded, in particular to support projects under Africa’s Agenda 2063,” he says, referring to the African Union’s long-term strategy to promote industrialisation, regional integration, infrastructure development and sustainable growth.

A new partnership, focussed on innovative financing mechanisms, is currently in the works, says Zhang Cheng. He notes that the WRI and its collaborators have so far mapped out three partnerships: the one described above, led by renewable energy associations from four countries and focusing on trade and investment matchmaking; a capacity-building initiative led by the Henghua School in Rwanda and Strathmore University in Kenya; and the financing platform in the works.