Soon af­ter dawn Bashir Bi­lal sat out­side on his usual plas­tic jerry can sur­rounded by young girls and boys chant­ing Ko­ranic verses. Each child clutched a worn plank of wood in­stead of an ex­er­cise book, writ­ing on it in Ara­bic script with ink made from char­coal and wa­ter.

In So­ma­lia the Is­lamic madrassa is of­ten the only ed­u­ca­tion on of­fer, but here in the Dadaab refugee camps it is just the start. Later in the day the chil­dren are able to at­tend, for free, pri­mary and even sec­ondary school while schol­ar­ships are avail­able for col­lege ed­u­ca­tion.

Up­rooted and dis­pos­sessed, life as a refugee is tough. But for the So­ma­lis who have for years, or even decades, called Dadaab home there are op­por­tu­ni­ties too. Bi­lal, 47, used to live in Af­goye, a bread­bas­ket town 30 kilo­me­tres (18 miles) north­west of the cap­i­tal Mo­gadishu. When he came to Dadaab five years ago he found bet­ter school­ing op­tions than at home where fees were high and chil­dren would of­ten spend their days help­ing out on the fam­ily farm.

“Chil­dren here in Dadaab have the priv­i­lege of bet­ter ed­u­ca­tion,” said Bi­lal. “They will bring change in So­ma­lia when they go back.”

Just when they will go back is contentious. Kenya’s government has hosted refugees from Somalia since 1991 when civil war tore the country apart. Since then Dadaab has grown into the world’s largest refugee settlement, with over 350,000 residents.

Kenya now wants the camps shut down claim­ing they are a se­cu­rity threat used by mem­bers of the She­bab, So­ma­li­a’s Al-Qaeda branch, for re­cruit­ment, train­ing and down­time.

Al­bert Ki­mathi, the area’s top gov­ern­ment of­fi­cial who, as deputy county com­mis­sioner is re­spon­si­ble for se­cu­rity, called Dadaab “the breed­ing ground, the train­ing ground” for She­bab. “They use the camps as safe havens,” he said.

“I’m not brand­ing any­one a ter­ror­ist, but quite a num­ber of these ter­ror­ists come from So­ma­lia. These peo­ple are one and the same,” said Ki­mathi.

– Hopes and dreams –

Peo­ple liv­ing in the camps find such al­le­ga­tions per­plex­ing.

Yakub Abdi left the south­ern city of Kismayo in 2011 af­ter She­bab gun­men ac­cused his fa­ther of be­ing a spy, and then ex­e­cuted both his par­ents. He hates and fears the mil­i­tants and so vol­un­teered to chair a neigh­bour­hood watch group in one of Dadaab’s five camps.

“This is not the place they are re­cruit­ing,” said the 29-year old fa­ther of two. His 260 fel­low vol­un­teers in the Com­mu­nity Peace and Pro­tec­tion Team keep tabs on new ar­rivals to their camp, re­port­ing any­one sus­pi­cious to po­lice.

“She­bab are not here,” said Abdi, but he warned that the in­vis­i­ble, largely un­pro­tected bor­der just 80 kilo­me­tres (50 miles) to the east, meant they were not far away ei­ther.

De­spite liv­ing in tem­po­rary shel­ters and barely sub­sist­ing on food hand­outs, Dadaab is not a place of uni­ver­sal mis­ery and hope­less­ness.

“Peo­ple think there’s no life in the camps, but there is life,” said Liban Mo­hamed, a 28-year old film­maker from Kismayo, in south­ern So­ma­lia. “There are prob­lems here but there are also hopes and dreams.”

Mo­hamed’s dream is to be re­set­tled in the US where his mother and sib­lings al­ready live, and to con­tinue mak­ing films. For oth­ers the dream is closer to home, and nearer to be­ing re­alised.

Mo­hamed Os­man is a trained med­ical of­fi­cer who for the last 15 years has pro­vided free con­sul­ta­tions, af­ford­able drugs and in-pa­tient treat­ment at his pri­vate phar­macy. He left So­ma­lia in 1992 seek­ing safety and pros­per­ity and in Dadaab, his fam­ily and busi­ness have thrived.

“Chil­dren in So­ma­lia have no hope,” said the 42-year old fa­ther of 12 chil­dren from two wives. “My chil­dren are learn­ing here.” He has no de­sire to re­turn to So­ma­lia be­cause “there is still fight­ing there”.

A short way from Os­man’s phar­macy, along flooded and un­even dirt roads, the daily de­liv­ery of khat, a herb with a mildly nar­cotic ef­fect when chewed, was un­loaded.

A bro­ker who runs four pick-ups piled high with 50-kilo­gramme (110-pound) sacks of khat into Dadaab every day said he sells out his en­tire stock with­out fail, mak­ing more than 30,000 shillings (280 eu­ros) on each truck.

In a frenzy of ac­tiv­ity the re­tail­ers, in­clud­ing 43-year old Fa­tima Ahmed, split the sacks open on the ground sort­ing the vivid green shrub into kilo bunches. Prices are sea­sonal and low dur­ing the cur­rent rainy pe­riod, but still, Ahmed said, she buys at 100 shillings (1 euro, $1.12) and sells at 150 shillings (1.40 euro) mak­ing a mod­est daily in­come. “It’s a good busi­ness,” Ahmed said.

Sell­ers’ prof­its are ploughed back into Dadaab’s thriv­ing econ­omy which, ac­cord­ing to a 2010 study, is worth around $25 mil­lion (22m eu­ros) a year. The re­search, com­mis­sioned by Kenya’s De­part­ment of Refugee Af­fairs, found that Dadaab also earned the nearby non-refugee, or host, com­mu­nity $14m (13m eu­ros) a year in trade and con­tracts.

– Mini Dubai –

Each camp has its own mar­ket but Ha­gadera is the most es­tab­lished. A Kenyan of­fi­cial de­scribed it as “a mini Dubai”.

There are ho­tels and restau­rants sell­ing grilled camel meat, chilli hot samosas and spiced tea with camel milk, gen­eral stores with shelves of pasta, rice, milk pow­der and sugar — much of it smug­gled in from So­ma­lia and sold at a steep dis­count — elec­tron­ics shops with the lat­est smart­phones, nar­row al­leys stuffed with stalls sell­ing new and sec­ond­hand clothes, fab­rics and shoes and shady pas­sages lined with tar­pau­lins piled with man­gos, av­o­ca­does, pota­toes and onions.

Ali Saha, a 23-year old uni­ver­sity grad­u­ate who runs a cy­ber­café, said he wants to re­turn to So­ma­lia, just not yet.

“Ed­u­ca­tion is a priv­i­lege and from that an­gle be­ing a refugee is not that bad,” he said. “I should re­turn so I can help my com­mu­nity in So­ma­lia but I need to go back when my coun­try is sta­ble.”