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| - When Abdoulaye Sawadogo, a small farmer in Burkina Faso, took in some desperate people who had fled violence, he believed the group would be staying for a few weeks and then move on. That was more than a year ago. About 1,000 people now live on the groundnut grower's two hectares (five acres) on the outskirts of Kaya, in the north of the jihadist-hit Sahel country. Sawadogo, 37, doesn't know how to recover the use of his land. "We can't grow groundnuts as we did before," said Sawadogo, who inherited the family plot. Helpers "promised some financial support, but that has still not come through," he said. "Right now, we have nothing -- we have major problems to eat and to have just a little money." He is far from the only one in this position. According to the UN, some 3.5 million people have fled jihadist attacks and communal violence in Burkina Faso and its Sahel neighbours, Mali and Niger. More than one million people -- five percent of the population -- have left their homes in Burkina Faso alone. Many people are in dire straits in Kaya and other Sahel towns that have become the main places giving shelter to those displaced. Vast refugee camps, such as those in Kenya or Bangladesh, are rare in this vast, dusty region. "These welcoming communities are at the end of their tether," said Xavier Creach, the Sahel coordinator for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. "The needs for protection and humanitarian work are enormous and only increase pressure on the resources and the basic services that are already heavily limited." Kaya's population has more than tripled in just two years, rising from 117,000 to nearly 400,000, according to the municipal authorities. The population of the capital Ouagadougou has doubled. Kaya's mayor Boukare Ouedraogo admitted to being "overwhelmed". "We didn't foresee this massive movement. It has become a cost," the major said in his office, busy ahead of Burkina Faso's presidential and parliamentary elections on Sunday. In this commercial town, as in Segou and Mopti in central Mali and Tillaberi in southwest Niger, most displaced people have found shelter with local families. In June 2019, huge numbers of displaced reached Ouagadougou, where they were installed on the city's outskirts before many were turned away entirely. The eight sites they occupied in the capital's ninth district were cut back to three. Local authorities, fearing lack of infrastructure and the risk of infiltration by jihadists, urged the displaced to go home or to reception sites in the main towns of their regions. "People move to easily accessible areas" and congregate in towns, which "find themselves overwhelmed," said Armand Joseph Kabore, of the Laboratoire Citoyennetes research centre in Ouagadougou. The Koum-Lakre school on the outskirts of Kaya is on the front line of this human influx. Primary teacher Poussibila Sawadogo has a class of 140 children, who are taught in a tent stretched between two trees. Sunshine peeks through holes in the canvas. "Lots of students creates lots of problems. How can we keep discipline? The performance can't be as good" as before, said head teacher Hamadou Sawadogo. The school had already faced overcrowded classes of 75 students before the displaced families arrived. Education is only one of the challenges. "The displaced people, we have to find them food, they need to drink, we need cohesion between them and the inhabitants, we need security," mayor Ouedraogo said. Water was already in short supply, but now the town's wells are constantly overburdened, with long queues at the functioning pumps. For food, many depend on distributions from humanitarian agencies. Land use is also a major problem. Unapproved home construction has skyrocketed, so there are ever fewer available sites. Secondary towns such as Kaya "will develop on several levels," President Roch Marc Christian Kabore, who is running for re-election on Sunday, has said. Urban centres will house "a population that has all the means to live in a town, which will have access to water, education, health," he has said. The outskirts are likely to become home to "all those who will be on the margin of public services." The president warned that tensions lay ahead. "People need to work," he said. "These towns are going to be explosive -- the situation will inevitably create new conflicts." ah/pgf/nb/dl/ri
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