Socioeconomic Survey of Urban Refugees in Kenya, 2021 (Kenya)

Abstract

Kenya hosts over half a million refugees, who, along with their hosts in urban and camp areas, face difficult living conditions and limited socioeconomic opportunities. Most refugees in Kenya live in camps located in the impoverished counties of Turkana (40 percent) and Garissa (44 percent), while 16 percent inhabit urban areas—mainly in Nairobi but also in Mombasa and Nakuru.

Refugees in Kenya are not systematically included in national surveys, creating a lack of comparable socioeconomic data on camp-based and urban refugees, and their hosts. As the third of a series of surveys focusing on closing this gap, this Socioeconomic Survey of Urban Refugees's aim is to understand the socioeconomic needs of urban refugees in Kenya, especially in the face of ongoing conflicts, environmental hazards, and others shocks, as well as the recent government announcement to close Kenya’s refugee camps, which highlights the potential move of refugees from camps into urban settings.

The SESs are representative of urban refugees and camp-based refugees in Turkana County. For the Kalobeyei 2018 and Urban 2020–21 SESs, households were randomly selected from the UNHCR registration database (proGres), while a complete list of dwellings, obtained from UNHCR’s dwelling mapping exercise, was used to draw the sample for the Kakuma 2019 SES. The Kalobeyei SES and Kakuma SES were done via Computer-Assisted Personal Interviews (CAPI). Due to COVID-19 social distancing measures, the Urban SES was collected via Computer Assisted Telephone Interviewing (CATI). The Kalobeyei SES covers 6,004 households; the Kakuma SES covers 2,127 households; and the Urban SES covers 2,438 households in Nairobi, Nakuru, and Mombasa.

Questionnaires are aligned with national household survey instruments, while additional modules are added to explore refugee-specific dynamics. The SES includes modules on demographics, household characteristics, assets, employment, education, consumption, and expenditure, which are aligned with the Kenya Integrated Household Budget Survey (KIHBS) 2015–16 and the recent Kenya Continuous Household Survey (KCHS) 2019.

Additional modules on access to services, vulnerabilities, social cohesion, mechanisms for coping with lack of food, displacement trajectories, and durable solutions are administered to capture refugee-specific challenges.