The camp was created way back in 1991 when clashes erupted in the neighbouring country of Somalia forcing the current refugees at the camp to flee to Kenya for their safety.
At the time of creation, the camp only had 90,000 refugees and, thereafter, with successive waves of insecurity, inter-clan conflicts and famine in Somalia more people were driven into the country. Many other fleeing foreigners from Sudan and Ethiopia also trickled in. These earliest refugees were accommodated at the Dagahaley, Hagadera and Ifo camps which were already in existence by 1992.
Kenya as a country had no option but to accommodate the ever increasing refugees since it had agreed to the international encampment policy that compelled her to push all the refugees into camps. These Somalia refugees were hosted there with the hope that peace would soon dawn and go back to their country which to date, has never happened.
At the time, refugees who stayed at camps for a very long time would be resettled by the international community but never happened for the Dadaab case but later, the international pipeline was blocked because rich countries were no longer taking many refugees, which meant that the refugees had to either remain at the camps or go back to their mother nations. Furthermore, people reproduce and this is why the Dadaab Refugee Camp now stands as the world's largest refugee camp in the world.