TITLE:
A Systems Approach to Assessing Sustainability Capacity in Kalobeyei Refugee Settlement in Turkana County, Kenya
AUTHORS:
Anicet Adjahossou
KEYWORDS:
Humanitarian Settlement, Systems Engineering (SE), Sustainability, Capacity Assessment, Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE), Systems Modeling Language (SysML)
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Applied Sciences,
Vol.14 No.4,
April
10,
2024
ABSTRACT: Refugee settlements face several challenges in transitioning from a temporary planning approach to more sustainable settlements. This is mainly due to an increase in the number of forcibly displaced people over the last few decades, and the difficulties of sustainably providing social services that meet the required standards. The development of refugee settlements assumed that forcibly displaced people would return to their places or countries of origin. Unfortunately, displacement situations are prolonged indefinitely, forcing these people to spend most of their lives in conditions that are often deplorable and substandard, and therefore unsustainable. In most cases, the establishment of refugee settlements is triggered by an emergency caused by an influx of forcibly displaced people, who need to be accommodated urgently and provided with some form of international assistance and protection. This leaves little or no time for proper planning for long-term development as required. In addition, the current approach to temporary settlement harms the environment and can strain limited resources with ad hoc development models that have exacerbated difficulties. As a result, living conditions in refugee settlements have deteriorated over the last few decades and continue to pose challenges as to how best to design, plan, and sustain settlements over time. To contribute to addressing these challenges, this study proposes a new methodology supported by Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) and a Systems Modeling Language (SysML) to develop a typical sustainable human settlement system model, which has functionally and operationally executed using a Systems Engineering (SE) approach. To assess the sustainability capacity of the proposed system, this work applies a matrix of crossed impact multiplication through a case study by conducting a system capacity interdependence analysis (SCIA) using the MICMAC methodology (Cross-impact matrix multiplication applied to classification) to assess the interdependency that exist between the sub-systems categories to deliver services at the system level. The sustainability analysis results based on capacity variables influence and dependency models shows that development activities in the settlement are unstable and, therefore, unsustainable since there is no apparent difference between the influential and dependent data used for the assessment. These results illustrate that an integrated system could improve human settlements’ sustainability and that capacity building in service delivery is beneficial and necessary.