Refugee aspirations for higher education: Navigating disadvantage in Kakuma camp, Kenya

The impetus for this work came from a desire to integrate the perspectives of refugee youth on how higher education (HE) in refugee camps could be improved. While HE programmes exist in camps, they face numerous challenges, with only a fraction of refugees accessing them. I collaborated with fifteen refugee youth in Kenya’s Kakuma refugee camp, using participatory action research (PAR) and photovoice to examine their HE journeys. Through the theoretical lenses of capabilities approaches (CA) and fiduciary theory, my research focuses on the HE aspirations of refugees as an avenue to better understand their valued capabilities (Hart, 2016) and how they navigate contexts of disadvantage. Contrary to existing literature (Appadurai, 2004; Conradie & Robeyns, 2013; Ray, 2006) which predicted that living in impoverished conditions meant refugees would have low or no ‘capacity to aspire,’ I find refugees have significant HE aspirations, including for future careers and giving back to society. The distinct political environments that led to these individuals fleeing violence and becoming refugees was central to the formation of their aspirations. Refugees create non-linear pathways through HE to address institutional conversion factors and adapt their aspirations as their situations evolves, evidence of their navigational agency. I built a new version of the aspirations window (Mkwananzi, 2018; Ray, 2006), to show how agency, institutional support, and capabilities contribute to the realisation of aspirations. Higher education institutions (HEIs) influence on all three, indicative of their impact refugee students’ aspiration failures or successes. Given the power imbalance between institutions and refugees (Purkey, 2019), fiduciary theory clearly indicates a fiduciary duty of universities toward supporting refugees to realising their aspirations. I suggest this can be achieved by HEIs striving to become transformative institutions that to integrate refugee participation in their decision-making processes to enhance refugee wellbeing and dignity.