Refugees in Kenya’s Kakuma camp have fled war, raids and persecution. But even in a place of safety, life must be rebuilt again and again.
He almost whispers into the phone: “Jambo la kwanza ni uhai” – the first thing is life.
It was March 2018 in Oronyo, a village in South Sudan. Thomas Kisario Mariano was 18 years old. As was routine, his family – his parents, his four brothers and three sisters – had spent the day out in the fields farming. They came back home and found that all their cows were gone. “For us, cattle were everything.”
Everyone in the house was crying. It was far from safe. His father calmed the family down, and in the morning, they left for Torit, the closest town in Eastern Equatoria state. A week later, his father told them that without the cattle, there was no way he could keep taking care of them.
For Mariano, the theft was when home stopped feeling secure. He had to leave. “Some steal. Some raid,” he said. “There were cattle raiders, and there was civil war. The country was just not peaceful.”
His siblings were taken to Uganda. As a young man, Mariano made his own way, following the path of an older relative who had made a similar journey towards Kenya. Eventually he arrived at the border near Nadapal. And with a group, he waited until the UN refugee agency came to get him.
They took him to Kakuma, one of the world’s largest refugee camps.
Less a single camp than an aggregation of settlements, Kakuma was established in 1992 after civil war drove thousands of young boys from their families and villages in southern Sudan. Most still under 10, some fled to Ethiopia to escape death or induction into guerilla armies; others walked more than a thousand miles to reach Kakuma. Some died on the way. Those that lived came to be known as the Lost Boys of Sudan.
Today, Kakuma has expanded into multiple zones, including the newer Kalobeyei settlement. Together, as of 31 March 2026, Kakuma and Kalobeyei host 313,247 refugees and asylum seekers, according to the UN refugee agency. Most come from South Sudan, Somalia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Burundi, Ethiopia and Sudan.
The numbers tell only part of the story.
In East Africa, displacement is increasingly shaped not by a single emergency but by several layered on top of one another. War and political instability. But also, extreme weather made worse by climate change. In Somalia for instance, an estimated 211,000 people were displaced in the three months from October to December 2025. The causes were drought (52%), conflict (44%) and flooding (4%). Across sub-Saharan Africa, internal displacement had reached a record 38.8 million people by the end of 2024.
The Kakuma settlement is often described as a place of asylum. But for many families who flee war and conflict, refuge does not mean the end of instability. They find themselves at risk of being displaced again by flood, heat or the collapse of basic support. Safety can mean learning to endure a different set of pressures.
For Mariano, it is still worth the cost. Because “safety comes before everything”, he said. “Before cattle. Before land. Before food. Before all plans. You can make plans. You can work. But someone can come and take over everything.”
“The first thing is life.”
When safety is not stability
Mwanaidi Nerima is a protection assistant with Kenya’s Department of Refugee Services in Kakuma. She works on the front lines of asylum reception, among the officials who first meet people like Mariano when they arrive. The pressure is not only the number of people coming in, but their condition.
“Yesterday, we received someone with a gunshot wound. He was shot in Jonglei state. While receiving him, we notified Kenya Red Cross and International Red Cross that we have a gunshot-wound refugee. He was attended to at the hospital,” she said.
The tide of people ebbs and flows, but it never stops. “From November to early January, we were receiving an influx from Sudan and South Sudan. Maybe close to 200 per day. Yesterday [22 April 2026] we had 14 – five families from South Sudan and one family from Congo.” Is there ever a day no one arrives? Nerima almost laughs in response. “No, no, no.”
Once they are past Nerima, refugees must begin to reckon with a new set of challenges.
“While conflict was the main reason for my displacement, environmental challenges and climate change have continued to shape my experience in Kakuma,” Manahil Musa, a Sudanese refugee, told Dialogue Earth. Now an educator and social entrepreneur who co-founded the Blossoms of Hope initiative, Musa has spent 18 years of her life navigating Kakuma’s unpaved bylanes. “Life in Kakuma is not easy,” she said.
Access to quality education, healthcare and employment opportunities is not always guaranteed, she said, and many people live with the weight of displacement and trauma. When it rains, the flooding contaminates drinking water, and electricity becomes unreliable.
During teaching sessions, heavy rains cause the streams near her educational centre to overflow. Some students come late, others leave early, and some don’t come at all. “Even for those present, it is hard to concentrate because of the conditions. It impacts attendance, participation and the overall learning experience,” she said.
What Musa is describing is not an anomaly but a clear pattern. The camp sits in a landscape defined by extremes; long stretches of heat and dust, interrupted by sudden, often overwhelming rain. In recent years, those swings have sharpened. Dry seasons linger. Then, when the rains come, they arrive with force. The result is what development experts and meteorologists are calling “drought-to-deluge”.
Between the two, life becomes a matter of constant recalibration for refugees.
Shadrack Kiprono, a project advisor on humanitarian energy access at SNV, the Dutch development organisation, said: “Drought increases the need for irrigation, water pumping, cooling systems and refrigeration, all of which depend on energy. Water pumping is expensive. Small shops need refrigeration. Medicines need cooling. Vegetables sourced from far away need preserving. For people trying to diversify their livelihoods, everything becomes more difficult.”
When Thomas Kisorio Mariano first arrived in Kakuma, he was registered as size one – alone. “A single person could not be given a household, so they paired two people together. I was housed with a woman from Toposa,” he said. Then, in 2022, the floods came. “There is a small river called Tarach. When rain comes, it carries away entire houses. It carried away ours,” he said.
A house he had called home for four years, swept away by the raging river. “Sometimes there is drought. Sometimes there are floods. There is not much help. We were relocated to Kalobeyei and given a tent. We had to rebuild with the pieces we salvaged.”
Self-reliance without the means
Avril Ndambwe Shabani’s working life is organised around bees. For the past seven years, he has run Kakuma Bee Social Enterprise Limited, a refugee-led business that produces and sells honey and other bee products while supporting local beekeepers and farmers in Kakuma. “I fled ethnic and tribal conflict in my country, Democratic Republic of the Congo, in 2013. I had just completed my university studies then. It has taken me seven years to build my business,” Shabani said.
Shabani’s entrepreneurial spirit leans into what authorities in Kakuma are now increasingly encouraging: self-reliance and integration. Kiprono, for instance, says SNV’s work aims to support both refugees and host communities as users and suppliers of clean-energy technologies. Refugees manufacture improved cookstoves and briquettes, sell solar products and use solar panels in restaurants, shops and other businesses. Some 500 people, he says, have found work along these supply chains.
None of this comes without challenges and entrepreneurs like Shabani encounter structural exclusion often. “As a refugee, accessing loans from banks is challenging even when you have a good banking record. Travel outside the camp requires official documents that are hard to obtain, and these barriers limit both business growth and economic opportunities,” Shabani said.
And then there is climate. The impact on beekeeping, he says, is direct. “During drought, there are fewer flowering plants, so bees struggle to find nectar and pollen. This leads to reduced honey production, weaker colonies, and sometimes even the loss or migration of bees. During periods of heavy rain or flooding, vegetation can be destroyed, hives damaged, and activity disrupted,” Shabani said.
The national policy direction, meanwhile, is also towards self-reliance and integration. Kenya’s Shirika plan, launched in 2025, aims to turn camps such as Kakuma and Dadaab into integrated settlements linked to county systems and national services. Nerima said this government plan deals “mainly with socio-economic inclusion for refugees and the host community. It shifts the mindset from humanitarian assistance to socio-economic empowerment for sustainable development.”
The full plan shows that climate is not only one of its action areas, but part of the pressure the plan is trying to respond to. It states that Kenya’s “severe climatic changes” have increased in frequency and intensity. Shrinking grazing areas, drought and ecological decline have escalated land degradation, it says.
“Recognising the increasing pressures that climate change places on natural resources, the plan emphasises environmentally sustainable practices to mitigate environmental degradation and build long-term resilience,” the text reads.
It mentions initiatives to restore degraded land through tree planting and improve agricultural productivity via water conservation techniques, as well as “the adoption of climate-smart farming practices to enhance food security for refugees and host communities.”
The move towards integration is taking place in a world where humanitarian support is shrinking, with Kakuma exposed to shocks far beyond East Africa. The World Food Programme (WFP) said in May 2025 that around 720,000 refugees in Kenya would receive only 28% of their food ration from June unless new funding arrived. The situation had not improved by August, when WFP cut aid by 80% for those with income and by 60% for vulnerable groups, including pregnant women and disabled people, Al Jazeera reported.
And now, with the Iran war disrupting food and medicine supply chains to sub-Saharan Africa, aid organisations have called for a humanitarian corridor through the Strait of Hormuz.
For Shabani, while the transition towards self-reliance is important, many still lack support systems to sustain themselves. “There are still clear gaps, especially for those expected to be self-reliant without sufficient resources,” Shabani said.
And yet, for Thomas Kisario Mariano, even this precarity is preferable to return. He refuses to think of South Sudan as home anymore. “People do not always understand what trauma stays with you. Even remembering brings pain,” he said.
He has visited because his parents still live there. But it is in Kakuma that he has built a life, however fragile, that is his own. That tension, between a deep and troubled attachment to home and the hard reality that makes permanent return impossible, is one many refugees live with. Fellow refugee Musa, who is from Sudan, says: “While hope may remain in the heart, there is also a need to build a life where one is.”
Mariano’s life in Kakuma now includes four children – three daughters and a son. “And honestly, I don’t hope for them to grow up back home. Because there, people lose too much. You can lose your life,” he said.
“Jambo la kwanza ni uhai – the first thing is life.”
Note: The UNHCR images featured above may be republished as part of this article, following the terms of Dialogue Earth’s Creative Commons licence.
Đăng nhận xét