Wearing a long, gold knitted dress, Achol Malual Jau strode confidently along the runway at London Fashion Week.
The South Sudanese model, 23, who had for months practised walking in heels back at her refugee camp, described her experience at the catwalk show last year as “amazing”.
Just five months later, though, Jau was back in the camp in Kenya, the show she believed would cement her modelling career a distant memory.
“I worked hard but came back with no money. A lot of people think I have money because I went to Europe – I say I have nothing,” says Jau from the hut she shares with her family in the Kakuma refugee camp, one of the biggest in the world.
Run by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), it is home to 280,000 people, more than half from South Sudan, the poorest country on the planet, where civil and tribal warfare has killed and displaced millions.
An investigation by the UK’s Sunday Times has established that top fashion labels are using models recruited from this refugee camp. Local scouts search for talent and send photos to bosses thousands of miles away in Europe. Some scour through refugees’ Instagram accounts.
Young women and men in Kakuma are desperate to break into modelling as a way to escape.
The agencies sourcing talent from the camp have said recruiting from Kakuma means they are giving refugees a better chance in life, while also making the catwalk more diverse. Yet concerns have been raised about the welfare of some of the models recruited in this way.
One teenage model described how she was “discovered” at the camp in September 2022 and flown to Paris, where she was deemed too malnourished to work and flown back after just six days. Another said she signed a contract she barely understood and was sent to Paris before being flown home after 17 days. Later, she received a document laying out debts to her agency of more than $4000.
“People think
