When camps for displaced populations are created, the sites are occasionally sub-optimal and in need of careful design to ensure population safety, logistics management, and environmental responsibility.
While there are excellent standards for such sites, it's sometimes difficult to match international standards with the geography offered by the host nation. We propose the development of an Android application to help with the standards-based environmental design of displaced population camps.
The Daadab Refugee Camp in northeastern Kenya was originally designed to house roughly 30,000 Somali refugees in 1990. The original request from UNHCR had a location very distant from the land eventually granted to UNHCR and the site had issues. It is now, regrettably, the third largest city in Kenya with more than 400,000 refugees and inadequate water, sanitation, transportation, and cooking fuel.
Having a comprehensive understanding of the characteristics of the site (climate, water table, geology, land cover, etc) might have altered the tenor of the arguments made about the site and led to either an improved location choice from the Kenyan government, or a design for the existing site that optimized the available resources and limited the eventual population expansion through improved branch planning.