By David Crane
In March 2025, the Government of Kenya launched the Shirika Plan, an 11-year transformation initiative aimed at integrating refugees into the country’s socioeconomic fabric by converting the two largest refugee complexes – Dadaab and Kakuma – into formal municipalities. The Plan is funded primarily by the World Bank and has already received praise from the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) as a model that should be replicated elsewhere. However, as of October 2026, only 23 percent of the reported $943 million budget required to implement the Plan has been announced as secured, coinciding with broader funding cuts to the sector that have left the more than 800,000 refugees hosted in Kenya relying on food rations that provide just 28 percent of recommended portions.
This is not an isolated case: Kenya has repeatedly designed ambitious refugee policies in close collaboration with western donors, only to see implementation fall short of what was promised. This blog post asserts that the pattern is the product of donor withdrawal weakening the government’s incentive to implement reforms, and securitised narratives of refugees making non-implementation politically viable, with each reinforcing the other. Without structural reform, both domestically and internationally, refugees and host communities will continue to pay the price.
A recurring challenge
The Kalobeyei Integrated Socio-Economic Development Plan (KISEDP) was introduced in 2015 by the Government of Kenya in collaboration with UNHCR and UN-Habitat with the aim of shifting from a traditional humanitarian aid model in Kakuma to one of self-reliance and development, through a set of multi-sectoral initiatives. The Plan set out an ambitious programme of support across community relations, education, health, water and sanitation, and financial inclusion. Although the Plan garnered early applause from the European Union, donor fatigue and technical challenges hampered progress, with a mid-term evaluation funded by UNHCR concluding that integration between refugees and host communities had been slower than expected. By 2025, the Plan was operating with a $20 million budget deficit.
Exacerbating financial challenges, the Government of Kenya has consistently undermined the spirit of the Plan, including through numerous announcements of the imminent closure of Dadaab Camp (May 2016, February 2021), as well as applying pressure to UNHCR to wind-down operations and produce a closure plan (March 2021). Kenyan courts have intervened more than once: the High Court blocked the attempted Dadaab closure in 2016, and suspended the 2021 closure directive.
Following this, in November 2021, President U. Kenyatta assented to the Refugees Act, which came into force in February 2022. The purpose of the Act was explicitly to update the previous 2006 Refugees Act to ensure alignment with the Comprehensive Refugee Response Framework (CRRF). The CRRF is a global solidarity and refugee protection framework that was adopted by all 193 Member States of the United Nations in 2016, focused on promoting responsibility sharing within the global refugee regime and stronger self-reliance models of refugee hosting. Given the spotlight on the framework, along with the significant buy-in from donor countries, Kenya aimed to position itself as a regional leader in the enactment of the recommendations – including integration into national education and health services – which were then codified via the 2021 Act.
The timing of the Act is again instructive: at the same time that the progressive Act was being drafted, the Government was negotiating with UNHCR to set a closure date for Dadaab and Kakuma for mid-2022. With donor financial support failing to match the hype generated during the CRRF’s announcement, and growing socio-economic challenges in the country putting pressure on leaders to act, the government justified closure by claiming that refugees were responsible for social challenges including the growing insecurity in the regions. The closure push was accompanied by a tightening of refugee rights, including increasingly restricted freedom of movement – at odds with the integration agenda that the Act set out to advance. Comments by key political figures – including the Interior Minister – that presented refugees as a threat to national security further deteriorated relations between refugees and host communities, presenting additional roadblocks for integration.
Most recently, the Shirika Plan builds on the KISEDP to cover refugees and host communities in Kakuma and Dadaab, and aims to operationalize commitments made through the 2021 Refugees Act. Although questions remain on the extent of the freedoms and rights that the government aims to provide for refugees under the Plan, the pillars announced define the focus areas, which include social services, human capital development, sustainable economic development, and natural resource management.
Whilst $215 million has already been secured from the World Bank to implement the Plan, it is estimated that the full implementation would sum closer to $1 billion. As such, gaps have already been identified; for example, one aim of the Plan is to raise employment rates in order to reduce extreme poverty (with UNHCR noting that ‘the majority’ of the refugees and host communities in and around the camps live on less than $3 per day). However, with strict encampment policies remaining in place, there are few employment opportunities available. This is compounded by the fact that in 2025, when the Plan was introduced, total aid funding to Kenya for refugee support fell by 25 percent, coinciding with the funding cuts primarily driven by the US government.
Weak enforcement mechanisms
The issues stemming from financial shortcomings and harmful refugee narratives are exacerbated by severe gaps in enforcement mechanisms for the associated refugee laws and policies. For example, whilst the 2021 Refugees Act was drafted to align with the freedoms and rights provided through both the 1951 Convention and the 1969 OAU Convention – which include freedom of movement, refugees in Kenya are still expected to live in designated areas: although the Act did decriminalise movement outside those areas, in practice, a movement pass system still heavily restricts mobility. Similarly, key implementing regulations that are required to operationalize the rights that refugees have on paper – including for work permits and land tenure – remain in draft.
The international framework offers little to correct this: the Global Compact on Refugees is non-binding, whilst the 1969 OAU Convention, to which Kenya is a party, invokes ‘African solidarity’ to lighten the burden on states that struggle to continue granting asylum and/or supporting displaced individuals within their territories (see Article II(4)), but neither create any enforceable duty on the wealthier states on whom refugee protection so often depends. Domestic courts have acted as a check on the most drastic measures, as the 2017 and 2021 rulings noted above illustrate, but blocking camp closure does little, by itself, to deliver improved access to vital resources and services.
A self-fulfilling cycle
The three examples of attempts to reform conditions for refugees and host communities in Kenya highlight a clear pattern: ambitious policies are developed, but without adequate funding commitments in place prior to their introduction. When international funding dries up and alternative sources are not identified, the Government of Kenya has neither the resources, nor – in some cases – the political will to fill the gap. Public perceptions further hinder implementation: the Government continues to frame refugees in the country as a drain on resources and a security threat. This positioning makes integration – which is central to all three policies – far less likely, as it creates biases and expectations amongst host communities who are then expected to utilize shared services and work and live amongst these populations. These problems are indicative of two well-trodden bodies of theory within refugee studies:
(i) Securitisation theory: Kenyan officials have made a broad range of accusations against refugees, including arms smuggling and the planning of the Westgate Mall and Garissa University attacks, claims that are frequently made with little-to-no supporting evidence, which have subsequently been amplified by the press. For instance, in 2014, the Daily Nation’s managing editor wrote that Somalis in Kenya dream “to blow us up, knock down our buildings and slaughter our children.” In actuality, Human Rights Watch found that none of the four Garissa gunmen appeared to be a refugee and that no Somali refugee had been prosecuted or convicted of any attack in Kenya as of 2015. More broadly, a global analysis of refugee settlements between 1990 and 2018 found no evidence that hosting refugees raises the likelihood of conflict, and some evidence that large, established settlements reduce it through local development.
The narrative – that often specifically focuses on Somali refugees – endures partly because it draws on historical logics of governing African mobility: colonial administrators restricted Somali movement in the country by requiring passes to enter other districts, and Brankamp and Glück show that this lineage runs into counterterrorism, from the screening of Somali Kenyans to verify their citizenship, to Operation Usalama Watch – a large-scale antiterrorism campaign by the Government which held thousands of Somalis at Kasarani Stadium regardless of their citizenship status. Amnesty International reported that not a single Somali arrested during the operation was charged with a terrorism-related offence.
(ii) Responsibility sharing: Numerous scholars have utilizedpublic goods theory to illustrate how responsibility sharing amongst states for the financial and physical costs associated with refugee hosting tends to falter when said contributions are made on a voluntary basis; the system built on the likes of the CRRF and the Global Compact on Refugees is exactly that. Simultaneously, at least 68 percent of refugees are hosted in low- and middle-income countries, and resettlement pathways – which account for less than one percent of individuals under UNHCR’s mandate – fell by more than 50 percent between 2024 and 2025 alone.
Against this background, camp closure threats sometimes appear to be a bargaining strategy to prompt action and greater support from donors. This is not unique to Kenya: in 2016, after warning EU leaders that it could open its borders to allow the onward movement of hundreds of thousands of Syrian asylum seekers, Turkey secured an additional €6 billion in aid. Having threatened camp closures in 2015, 2016, 2019 and 2021, Kenya has received at least some additional support; for example, the United States pledged US$45 million after 2015, to be withheld if the camps closed. However, the frequency of threats may be detrimental to credibility: Cannon’s analysis argued that stakeholders were less responsive to the 2016 announcement at least partly because they had not believed Kenya would go through with repatriating refugees. Additionally, unlike in Turkey’s case, where the costs of refugee movement would have fallen directly on EU states, the theoretical consequences of Kenya’s threats fall chiefly on the refugees themselves, producing a less compelling investment narrative for donors.
Taken together, the two lenses highlight how reduced funding weakens the Government’s incentive to implement integration, securitised discourse lowers the political cost of not doing so, and visible failure then reinforces the narrative of refugees as a ‘burden’.
Breaking the cycle
Under these conditions, refugees – and to a lesser extent, local host communities – will continue to miss out on the freedoms and rights to which they are entitled under both domestic and international law.
There is a role for both the international community and the Government of Kenya: the international community can improve its role in responsibility sharing by providing more predictable multi-year funding commitments that enable stronger continuity and facilitate long-term strategic planning, as well as by providing technical assistance to domestic agencies responsible for implementation. The Government, meanwhile, should prioritize publishing the outstanding implementation regulations related to the 2021 Act, including on work permits and the mapping of designated areas, and give refugee-led organisations a formal role in overseeing the Shirika Plan, to ensure that their expertise and lived experiences are fully captured and utilized.
Until funding commitments, legal reform, and public narratives move together, the Shirika Plan risks joining a long list of promising Kenyan refugee policies that never fully arrived.
Gaps between policy and implementation shape what refugees can expect when they flee and what they can know and understand upon their arrival. When policies do not match practice, this presents an additional barrier in an already complex and limited information environment. This complexity is a central theme within my current PhD research which focuses upon access to accurate information prior to and during refugee flight in East Africa.
David Crane is a PhD researcher at SOAS University of London. His PhD research focuses on refugee journeys in East Africa, with a particular emphasis on refugee’s access to information prior to and during their journeys, including the sources and accuracy of this information. David’s broader research interests include refugee agency and decision-making, public discourses around refugees and how refugees experience these, and refugee diplomacy.
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