What Kakuma is
Kakuma is a real refugee camp in Turkana County, northern Kenya. It was established in 1992 to take in the so-called "Lost Boys of Sudan", thousands of unaccompanied South Sudanese minors fleeing civil war, and it has never stopped growing since. Today, the camp of Kakuma, the Kalobeyei settlement and Eldoret together host over 314,000 registered people, 61% of them 18 or younger.
The schools inside the camp aren't enough: roughly half of school-age children remain out of any education path, and only 6% of those eligible reach secondary school. Even for those who finish it, leaving Kakuma remains hard, Kenya has enforced a strict "encampment" policy for decades, limiting the freedom of movement of people with refugee status.
The bridge to Irene School
We first visited Kakuma in 2019. Faced with these numbers, we launched a pioneering project: sponsoring the transfer of a few students from the camp to partner schools outside Kakuma, starting with Irene School in Maralal.
Marna, Kachiri, Kapilu and Nyayang' were the first four students to arrive. We've kept following them, and everyone who's come after them, well past graduation.
How we select
School merit alone doesn't tell the whole story. In selection, we combine merit criteria with a direct understanding of the situation a student achieved those results in: the same score on the national exam can mean something very different if it was reached studying at night, without electricity, inside a refugee camp.
That's why we keep making regular visits to our sponsored students and their families, even after selection. Over the years we've supported students from the Democratic Republic of Congo, Burundi, Rwanda, South Sudan and Sudan.
Where they are today
Since 2019, together with Irene School Maralal and Nielimishe, we've supported the transfer of 25 students from Kakuma to partner schools, 5 boys and 20 girls. Some of them are now finishing university.
Kachiri, one of the first four to arrive from Kakuma, won a scholarship to Strathmore University in Nairobi to study International Relations, and just completed an internship at the Embassy of South Sudan, the same country she had, years earlier, been forced to flee. That's how we try to support our students: not just school fees, but real work experience and exposure too.
A break, together
In 2021 we organized a trip to Lake Turkana for our sponsored students during the school holidays, a moment meant to be exactly that: a break, away from books and from the camp.
Read more
To understand what Kakuma really is, and why leaving it is so hard, we wrote a separate article.
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