SPOT LIGHT Somalia Returning ‘home’ from Dadaab camp With nearly 900,000 refugees from Somalia living mainly in Ethiopia, Kenya and Yemen, the cross-border displacement of Somalis is a regional phenomenon.249 Another 1.1 million people are internally displaced within the country, more than 890,000 of them in south-central areas, and Somalia hosts significant numbers of refugees from other countries.250 All of these factors both contribute to, and are a result of its persistent insecurity. A Somali family looks on as a plane arrives in Dadaab refugee camp to take them back to Mogadishu, Somalia. They were one of 40 families returning that day as part of a voluntary return programme. Photo: NRC/ Fredrik Lerneryd, September 2016 64 GRID 2017 There were 324,000 Somali refugees registered with UNHCR in Kenya at the start of 2017.251 Many arrived in search of protection as long ago as 1991. Others have been born and raised in the country. Life, however, is extremely precarious, particularly for those in the Dadaab refugee camps. The Kenyan government announced in May 2016 that it would make further attempts to close the camp complex and disband its Depart- ment of Refugee Affairs, which had previously been responsible for the registration, coordination and the revocation of prima facie refugee status for Somali refugees.252 These moves have increased pressure on Somalis to return to their country via a voluntary repatriation scheme established under a tripartite agreement between UNHCR and the Kenyan and Somali governments in 2014. The scheme helped more than 33,000 to do so in 2016, compared with 6,000 in the preceding two years.253 The Somalia Protection, Return and Monitoring Network (PRMN) recorded a further 28,355 spontaneous returns outside the repatriation scheme. This brings the total number of recorded returns in 2016 to more than 67,000. A UNHCR survey in mid-2016, however, found that 74 per cent of Somali refugees in the Dadaab camps did