Floris Faber is Director of ACT Alliance EU. The views expressed are his own.
In a recent reflection on war, and the fragility of law, I wrote ‘we become what we normalise’. I had the erosion of humanitarian principles in mind. I was thinking of how suffering becomes acceptable when budgets shrink, or when political pressure favours ‘efficiency’ over duty of care.
Kakuma’s New Model
The New Humanitarian’s recent reporting from Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya shows this erosion in its rawest form. It shows what happens when distant political decisions meet daily life for families who depend on humanitarian assistance to stay alive.
Up to August, every refugee in Kakuma received the same food ration. Then a new model arrived. It divided people into four categories. Category 1 received 40 per cent of a full ration. Category 2 received 20 per cent. Categories 3 and 4 were cut off. A third of the camp lost all food aid.
This was presented as ‘better targeting’ in a time of deep funding cuts. Those cuts are global. They come from Europe, they come from other donors. They come above all from the United States, which has withdrawn large sums from its humanitarian lines at the very moment global needs are rising.
The Flaw in the Logic
The logic behind the new model sounds simple. The most vulnerable should get support. Resources are scarce. Aid must be used with care.
Yet Kakuma exposes the flaw in this logic. Everyone is poor. Everyone is hungry. And the local economy depends on the small amounts of food and cash that circulate each month. When that flow stops, everything stops. Shops close. Debts cannot be repaid. Solidarity weakens. The social systems that help people endure hardship break.
Human Consequences
The human stories are stark. Parents who skip meals so children can eat. Women forced into survival sex. Families selling their last assets. Shelters dismantled and sold for parts. People leaving the camp because they cannot survive.
Some return to countries where violence, instability, or floods still threaten their lives. Others speak openly about suicide because they cannot watch their children go hungry.
More Than Bad Design
This is more than bad design. It is a protection failure. It is a moral failure. And it is not only, or primarily, the EU. Drastic cuts by the United States, the United Kingdom, and others have drained the system and forced agencies and people into impossible choices.
When Pressure Becomes Force
When families are pushed to leave a camp because they have no food and they return to places where they may be harmed the line between choice and pressure disappears. Lawyers call this ‘constructive refoulement’. In plain terms, it means a person is not forced out by police but is driven out by conditions that make staying impossible. The effect is the same. A refugee ends up back in danger.
A Story About Neighbourliness
The Good Samaritan comes to mind here, Jesus’ story about what neighbourliness is. A man lies beaten by the roadside. Religious leaders cross to the other side of the road, ignore him, pass him by; they see him and do nothing. The one who does stop is the stranger who refuses to look away. He does not weigh his duty in percentages or ask if the man is ‘eligible’. He acts because the need is clear. This story still confronts us. It asks who we are, who we become when we cross to the other side.
What Targeting Cannot Fix
We as Europeans, we become what we normalise. Humanitarian budgets are shrinking. The pressure to ‘target better’ is rising. But Kakuma shows what targeting looks like when poverty is universal. It shifts the burden of scarcity onto households that already have nothing. It treats exclusion as a management tool. It reframes hunger as a data issue.
And this brings me back to the earlier reflection. We become what we normalise.
If we normalise hunger as an acceptable outcome of budget ceilings, protection will not weaken. It will vanish.
If we normalise policies that remove support from thousands at once, we normalise the collapse of dignity and safety.
If we normalise the idea that refugees can be ‘self-reliant’ without the minimum resources required to live, we normalise despair as a system outcome.
What Kakuma Asks of Us
The truth is simple. When aid levels are too low, targeting cannot solve the problem. It only shifts the suffering. It forces people into choices no one should face.
Kakuma forces us to decide what kind of world we are willing to accept. Humanitarian assistance is not just about calories. It is about protection. It is about the space to live without fear. It is about a minimum commitment to human dignity.
If we normalise a world where entire categories of refugees can be cut off from food, we normalise a world in which hunger becomes an acceptable price of budget discipline. And we normalise a world in which we accept that people suffer, sell their bodies, go without food so their children can eat, or lose hope entirely because we do not care.
That is what happens when we cross to the other side of the road.
The warning holds: We become what we normalise. I become what I normalise.
Image concept: Floris Faber | AI-generated
