“Securing” Educational Rights for Urban Refugees in Kenya’s Volatile Policy Environment

• In Event: Highlighted Session: Urban Refugees: Implications for Educational Policy and Practice

Proposal

Access to quality education serves as a source of protection and provides a sense of normalcy to refugee children. For this reason, guaranteeing urban refugees’ right to access public schools has been a priority among UN agencies, donors and other international advocacy organizations. Nonetheless, worldwide, we note that even the most welcoming policy environments are under constant threat by security rhetoric that ostracizes refugees as outsiders and inherent sources of instability. This paper uses the case of Kenya to examine how inclusive educational policies and exclusionary security rhetoric intersect at the local level to shape opportunities for schooling for urban refugees in Nairobi.

Kenya offers a case of a welcoming educational policy landscape for urban refugees. Kenya is home to over 550,000 refugees in camps and in urban settings and the Kenyan Constitution clearly states that the government of Kenya (GoK) is responsible for protecting these refugees as it is a signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention, the Convention on the Rights of the Child and the International Covenant on Economic, Social & Cultural Rights.

However, following a string of terrorist attacks in 2012 and 2014, the GoK ordered the strict enforcement of an Encampment Policy, a “policy” (as its legality has been highly contested) restricting refugees’ residence exclusively to the camps. This directive indicated that Dadaab and Kakuma were the only designated areas for refugees and asylum seekers to reside in Kenya. In May 2016, the GoK issued a directive to close down its refugee camps and Department of Refugee Affairs (DRA), the government office responsible for the registration of all refugees.

Our paper explores how the current volatility and shifting political landscape of Kenya impacts the formation of refugee education policy at the national level and the implementation of these policies at the local level. Data comes from an in-depth case study of policy review and 30 semi-structured key informant interviews with representatives from UN, INGOs, NGOs, CBOs, and the GoK in February 2016.

We found that both policy formation and implementation of these policies have been hampered by the unpredictable and volatile political situation and as a result Kenya is struggling to address the educational needs of urban refugees. Although Kenya has hosted refugees for many decades and has put in place an inclusive policy environment that extends to refugee populations, the situation changes abruptly when violence and terrorist acts take place that are attributed (accurately or not) to members of a refugee population in the country. Our research finds that this landscape not only impedes policy formation, but it also hinders the implementation of policies at the local level where we found that refugee children face undue burdens that become barriers to school including high school fees, inflexible language policies, and discrimination. This research shines a light on the specific educational needs of urban refugee students in Kenya and charts a path forward that will address the missteps of national and local officials that hinder urban refugees access to education.

Authors

• Mary Mendenhall, Teachers College, Columbia University

• Peter Bjorklund, Teachers College, Columbia University