Now, the boxer, model, and UNICEF ambassador is using her platform to advocate for displaced people and girls’ education. Her latest journey took her to Kenya’s Dadaab refugee camp, one of the largest in the world.

Ali fled Somalia with her family after her brother was killed during the civil war. They spent about a year in Kenya before resettling in London, where Ali discovered boxing as a teenager. What began as a way to gain confidence and escape bullying became a lifelong calling.

“I was a young girl, bullied in secondary school,” she told CNN. “Boxing was a space where I could make friends. I was gaining confidence as my body changed, and I was getting healthier. That’s what I loved most — and over time it became something I wanted to master.”

Her rise was extraordinary. Ali won England’s national and Great British titles and claimed the 2019 African Zone Featherweight Crown as an amateur boxer. In 2020, she made history as the first boxer to represent Somalia at the Olympics, in Tokyo — becoming a symbol of resilience and representation.

“You can’t be what you can’t see,” Ali said. “If people can see me doing it, then maybe they’ll believe they can too.”

“This could have been me”

In September, Ali’s path came full circle when she returned to Kenya with UNICEF and the Danish Refugee Council, visiting communities in Nairobi’s Dandora and Eastleigh neighborhoods and later traveling north to Dadaab.

There, she met girls, mothers, and teachers working to build better futures despite dwindling aid. For Ali, the experience was an emotional reminder of what could have been.

“Had I not left Kenya, this could have been me,” she said. “It’s humbling to see how these women are doing everything they can to give their kids a chance.”

At the Kasarani Sasa recycling group in Dandora, a collective of more than 200 waste pickers — mostly refugee women — Ali joined in with the work, helping to sort and weigh plastic and cardboard. The program provides childcare and informal education for their children while offering mothers a safe way to earn an income.

“You always think about these things, but when you see it firsthand, it’s different,” Ali said. “If we hadn’t left Kenya, this could have been my mum in this situation. It’s heartbreaking, because you want to help everyone — but there are so many.”

At FilmAid Kenya, a creative learning program in Dadaab that teaches filmmaking and storytelling to young refugees, Ali shared her own story with students. Many of the girls, she said, had dreams of becoming doctors, nurses, or psychologists — despite the challenges of growing up in a camp.

“It was really important for me to tell them how education changed my life,” she said. “Even in an environment like this, they’re still hopeful and determined to achieve their dreams. Every dream matters.”

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To his surprise, “I found peace but no food,” the 30-year-old told The Associated Press. He stood near the withered maize he tried to plant around his family’s makeshift shelter of branches and plastic sheeting outside one of the world’s largest refugee camps.

As global food insecurity suffers another shock with Russia’s termination of a deal to keep grain flowing from Ukraine, the hundreds of thousands of Somalis who have fled climate change and insecurity offer a stark example of what happens when aid runs low.

Omar, a farmer, was forced to give most of his produce as tax to al-Shabab, the al-Qaida-linked extremists who have controlled parts of Somalia for years, and the little that remained wasn’t enough to feed his family during Somalia’s worst drought in decades. The final blow came when al-Shabab, under pressure from a Somali military offensive, killed his younger brother.

Dadaab is home to more than 360,000 registered refugees and many unregistered ones. The camp was established in the 1990s, its permanence reflected in the neat rows of corrugated iron homes in its older sections.

Food rations, however, are more fragile. They have been cut from 80% of the minimum daily nutritional requirement to 60% due to reduced donor funding, according to the World Food Program. Traditional donors have been quick to bring up hunger in places like Somalia when criticizing Russia for ending the grain deal, however they have focused their giving elsewhere, including Ukraine. In May, a high-level donors’ conference for Kenya, Somalia and Ethiopia raised less than $3 billion of the $7 billion that organizers wanted for humanitarian aid.

Refugee camps like Dadaab, especially in Africa, will see further cuts in aid because of Russia’s action, the WFP’s executive director, Cindy McCain, told the AP on Tuesday. Under the recently ended deal, WFP was procuring 80% of its global wheat supply from Ukraine.

“There are going to be some serious shortages and, in some cases, none at all as a result of this,” she said, adding that it was too soon to predict what those cuts would be.

Already, “families that used to prepare probably three meals a day have now reduced to prepare either two meals or a meal a day, and that’s quite extreme,” the WFP head of programs at Dadaab, Colin Buleti, told the AP at a food distribution center during a visit last week.

Families receive monthly rations of sorghum, rice, beans, maize and vegetable oil, alongside a cash transfer for buying fresh produce that has been halved to $3.

Aid workers say the reduced rations are likely to worsen malnutrition. In one of Dadaab’s three sections, Hagadera, 384 malnutrition cases were reported in the first half of the year, already exceeding the 347 reported there all of last year, according to the International Rescue Committee, which provides health services.

The malnutrition ward in Hagadera is filled beyond capacity with crying babies. It is meant to handle 30 patients and is currently at 56.

Dool Abdirahman, 25, arrived with her malnourished baby daughter in November. The family fled Somalia when the infant developed hydrocephalus, or a buildup of fluid on the brain. Until then, the family had struggled to hold out at home, Abdirahman said.

The International Rescue Committee’s health manager in Dadaab, Barbara Muttimos, said that even the nutrient-dense peanut paste used to treat children who are acutely and severely malnourished is threatened by reduced funding and the growing number of hungry people.

But for mothers like Mabina Ali Hassan, 38, the conditions in Dadaab are better than the nonexistent services back home, where conflict has destabilized the country over the past three decades.

“I regret going back to Somalia in 2016 when I heard it was safer,” the mother of eight said. “This baby was born there and couldn’t get health care because the hospitals were not equipped.” She said she returned to the refugee camp when her son, now a year old, became malnourished.

Maryan Mohamed, 30, said she was lucky to be among the newly registered refugees. The former teashop owner and her six children arrived at Dadaab in March and for four months lived off food handouts from friends who were already registered.

“While stability welcomed me here, I’m still striving for the life I dreamed of,” she said.

The threat of insecurity remains, even for the refugees. Al-Shabab this month attacked a Somali military base just 7 miles (12 kilometers) from the Kenya border. Somali forces are under pressure to assume security responsibilities as an African Union peacekeeping force continues its withdrawal from the country.

Kenya’s government is now in discussions with the United Nations on how to integrate the hundreds of thousands of refugees into host communities in the future. The U.N. refugee agency says such integration is the best way to host refugees as donor funding shrinks.

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Source: Associated Press

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