• by Jackson Okata (garissa, kenya)
• Wednesday, April 08, 2026
• Inter Press Service

GARISSA, Kenya , April 8 (IPS) - In 2006, Amina Saida was only two years old when her parents moved to the Dadaab refugee camp in northern Kenya, near the border with Somalia.

The Dadaab refugee complex was established in 1991, when refugees fleeing the civil war in Somalia began crossing the border into Kenya. Over the years, thousands of Kenyan ethnic Somalis entered the refugee camp with the sole aim of accessing food aid, healthcare, and free education provided to refugees, while others saw an easier avenue of securing asylum and passage to the US and other European nations.

Just like Amina, thousands of Kenyan Somalis were taken into the refugee camp as children without their consent, and today they are trapped in a painful paradox of officially being recorded as refugees in Kenyan government databases and denied recognition as citizens of Kenya.

“I was told that my fingerprints were appearing in the refugee database when I went to apply for my national identity card in 2022. The registrar of persons informed me that they could not grant me an ID because I was from Somalia,” said Amina.

Amina told IPS that despite presenting her parents’ Kenyan identification cards to the registrar of persons, she has yet to receive the vital document.

“I am still waiting and hoping,” she said.

Without a national identity card or passport, one cannot access basic services such as opening bank accounts, securing business premises, receiving healthcare, pursuing higher education, or gaining formal employment.

According to Haki na Sheria, a human rights organisation based in Garissa, Kenya, more than 40,000 Kenyans may have been registered as refugees in Dadaab. The crisis of double registration for Kenyan ethnic Somalis became more evident when, in March 2025, Kenya rolled out the Shirika Plan, an ambitious plan aimed at integrating refugees into host communities.

The problems with double registration began in 2007, when UNHCR implemented the biometrics system. UNHCR introduced biometric registration to better manage the hundreds of thousands of refugees living in the camps and to address fraudulent cases that arose during food distribution. Fingerprints of all existing and new refugees were captured.

In 2007, when Kenya operationalised the Refugees Act of 2006, the Department of Refugee Affairs (DRA) took over refugee management from UNHCR and assumed control of the refugee database in 2016.

Caught in Legal Limbo

Hamdi Mohamed was among those who moved into the refugee camp to shield his seven children from the pangs of hunger.

“In 2005, I lost all my livestock due to prolonged drought. There was a lot of hunger, and I moved my family into Dadaab and registered them as refugees,” said Mohamed.

“For 20 years, I lived within the Dadaab refugee camp with my children. Now they have come of age, but their future seems bleak. They want life outside the camp, but they can only keep dreaming of it.”

Mohamed said his children are considered neither citizens nor refugees.

“We have no relatives in Somalia, where the government of Kenya is alleging we came from,” he said.

Without IDs, Mohamed’s seven children are forced to live a life full of restrictions. They cannot move about freely, register a SIM card, open a bank account, enter many government and corporate offices, or gain formal employment.

“I fear one day the government might wake up and declare us undocumented migrants and deport us to Somalia, a country we have never set foot in,” Mohamed told IPS.

For Adan Gure, registering as a refugee was his only hope of joining his wife abroad.

He moved into the refugee camp in 2005, five years after his wife and two children had registered as refugees. In 2007, his spouse and children secured asylum in Canada.

“I never imagined it would end this way. All I hoped for was joining my family in Canada,’’ Gure told IPS.

He added, “My parents are Kenyan, but I am now living like a stateless person in my country because Kenya doesn’t recognise me as a citizen, and I can’t go to Somalia, where I know no one.”

The UN’s sustainable development goals envision a world where every person can access quality education, health care, and economic opportunity. “Achieving these global ambitions requires a collective effort that includes the full integration of refugees – one of the most vulnerable yet resilient populations,” according to the International Catholic Migration Commission.

It is these rights that those caught in this double registration impasse are fighting.

Fight for the Right to Citizenship

In 2021, three Kenyans, Hamdi Muhumed, Sahal Amin and Deka Gure, all of whom had been registered as refugees, sued the government, accusing it of failing in its duty to ensure citizens have access to and enjoy socio-economic rights. The petitioners also argued that the inclusion of their children’s names in the refugee database, without verifying whether or not they were foreigners, was erroneous.

They asked the court to order the Kenyan government to remove their names from the refugee database and issue them Kenyan identification documents.

In January 2025, the Kenyan High Court in Garissa County ordered the Kenyan government to remove vetted Kenyan citizens from the refugee database and issue them with national identification documents within 60 days. The court ruled that failing to deregister these individuals violated their constitutional rights to citizenship and identity.

In his judgment, Kenyan High Court Judge John Onyiego affirmed that citizenship is a birthright that administrative mishaps cannot revoke.

Government Remedy

Kenya’s Commissioner for Refugee Affairs, Mercy Mwasaru, told IPS that the government detected the problem of double registration in 2016 when it took over the management of refugee affairs from UNHCR.

“Since 2019, the government of Kenya, through the departments of refugee services, national registration bureau and national intelligence service and in conjunction with UNHCR, has been carrying out a verification process of those Kenyans whose details appear in the refugee database,” said Mwasaru.

But since the vetting and verification process began, people like Adan who went through the rigorous vetting procedure are still waiting to shed their refugee status and be given national IDs.

According to Mwasaru, the exercise takes a long time because the security and intelligence personnel in the Kenyan government must be engaged to prevent fraud.

Since 2019, Mwasaru says they have cleared at least 14,000 Kenyans from the refugee database, and the department is currently working to clear the remaining 26,000 citizens, a process she says might take time.

“The process takes time because of the work involved, and it involves different agencies. But we will ensure that anyone who is a Kenyan citizen and who registered as a refugee is removed from the refugee register,” Mwasaru told IPS.

Gure says he was among the 14,000 Kenyans who underwent vetting and had their names removed from the refugee database, but since then, they have not been issued national identification cards.

“We were vetted in 2020 and told that the IDs would be out within three months, but that never happened,” Gure said.

He hopes that with the court ruling, the government might hasten the process.

“We are not giving up. Our citizenship is a right that cannot be taken away from us,” said Gure.

Note: This article is brought to you by IPS Noram in collaboration with INPS Japan and Soka Gakkai International in consultative status with ECOSOC.

IPS UN Bureau Report

© Inter Press Service (20260408091650) — All Rights Reserved. Original source: Inter Press Service

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