Kakuma isn’t just the place where we carry out one of our projects. It’s a refugee camp in northern Kenya, in Turkana County. To understand why we support the bridge to schools in Samburu County, you first need to understand what Kakuma is.
What Kakuma is
The camp was established in 1992 to take in thousands of unaccompanied South Sudanese minors fleeing the second Sudanese civil war: the so-called “Lost Boys of Sudan.” It has never stopped growing since. Over time, the Sudanese wave was joined by people fleeing Somalia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Burundi and, more recently, an independent South Sudan.
The numbers today
According to UNHCR data from April 2026, the camp of Kakuma, the Kalobeyei settlement and Eldoret together host 314,888 registered people, most of them minors. Around a hundred schools, pre-primary, primary and secondary, serve the area between Kakuma and Kalobeyei.
On secondary education specifically, a gender analysis published in 2024 by the Jesuit Refugee Service (JRS), UNHCR’s partner for secondary education in Kakuma, gives a clearer picture: as of October 2023, the gross secondary-school enrolment rate stood at 45.5% (72.1% for boys, just 26.4% for girls), girls made up only 34% of enrolled students, and roughly 70% of enrolled students were older than the standard 14–18 age range, a sign of schooling that is often interrupted or started late. The same report estimates that 88.4% of secondary-school-age children and youth remained out of any schooling at that level, with classes averaging more than 100 students.
A “gross” enrolment rate counts enrolled students of any age against the secondary-school-age population: it is not the same as the percentage of adolescents who actually attend secondary school. It’s this gap, especially for girls, that our work addresses.
Getting past the numbers isn’t enough
Getting past these numbers means more than finding a place in school. Kenya has enforced a strict “encampment” policy for decades: people with refugee status cannot move freely outside the camp without specific permits, and even where the law promises paths to integration, as the 2021 reform does, access to documents, work permits and the formal job market remains slow, complicated, and often stuck in bureaucracy. For a student from Kakuma, finishing secondary school isn’t enough: someone needs to be willing to concretely support the next step, outside the camp.
Our bridge
That’s where our work comes in: sponsoring the transfer of students from Kakuma to schools in Samburu County, and staying with them well past graduation. And that’s why we like to tell you how it turns out, when it goes well. Some of the students we’ve supported are about to finish university. One of them just completed an internship at the Embassy of South Sudan, the same country she had, years earlier, been forced to flee. A real full-circle moment: from a refugee camp to representing her own country in the world, even if just for an internship.
Sources: UNHCR Operational Data Portal, Kenya (April 2026); Jesuit Refugee Service (JRS), Breaking Down Barriers: Increasing Girls’ Access to and Completion of Secondary Education in Kakuma (2024).