Work and Economy
While there are several international organizations (ECHO, WFP, Oxfam, UNHCR etc.) working in the camps, the Polisario has insisted on using mainly local staff for construction, teaching etc. It argues that this will help activate the refugee population, to avoid a sense of stagnation and hopelessness after 30 years in exile. However, jobs remain scarce and those Sahrawis educated at universities abroad can rarely if ever find opportunities to use their skills. Some Sahrawis work in nearby Tindouf city.
A simple monetary economy began developing in the camps during the 1990s, after Spain decided to pay pensions to Sahrawis who had been forcibly drafted as soldiers in the Tropas Nomadas during the colonial time. Money also came from Sahrawis working in Algeria or abroad, and from refugees who pursue a traditional bedouin and tuareg lifestyle, herding cattle in Algeria, Mauritania and the Polisario-held areas of Western Sahara. The private economy however remains very limited, and the camps continue to survive mainly on foreign and Algerian aid.
Read more about this topic: Sahrawi Refugee Camps
Famous quotes containing the words work and/or economy:
“In not having an appointment at Harvard, I’m in the company of a great many people whose work I admire tremendously, in particular women of color.”
—Catharine MacKinnon (b. 1946)
“The aim of the laborer should be, not to get his living, to get “a good job,” but to perform well a certain work; and, even in a pecuniary sense, it would be economy for a town to pay its laborers so well that they would not feel that they were working for low ends, as for a livelihood merely, but for scientific, or even moral ends. Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love of it.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)