By Reponse Kabizo.
“If you want to go fast go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” -African proverb.
For many years, the global humanitarian system has largely chosen speed over depth. In moments of crisis, international agencies arrive with urgency: funding is mobilized, tents are erected, food distributions are organized and emergency structures are set in motion. This intervention is often well-intentioned and sometimes life-saving in the short term. Yet over time, a persistent pattern emerges. Many humanitarian programs fail to achieve lasting impact, and in some cases, they generate unintended harm.
A central reason for this failure is not lack of resources, but lack of inclusion. Refugees are too often treated as passive recipients of aid rather than active participants in designing the systems that govern their lives. Decisions are made in distant offices, shaped by institutional frameworks and global indicators that frequently fail to reflect the lived realities on the ground.
As stated by the UNHCR policy engagement with the Refugee Led Organizations, meaningful participation of refugees is essential for improving accountability and effectiveness in humanitarian response.
Nowhere is this disconnection more visible than in Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya, one of the largest and most established refugee settlements in the world.
When Design Without Participation Becomes Harmful
A recent example is the Differentiated Assistance program implemented in Kakuma. Designed primarily by external actors, the program sought to categorize households based on vulnerability assessments intended to determine levels of assistance. While the logic behind such targeting frameworks may appear efficient on paper,it makes sense amid funding shortages but in practice the implementation revealed their fundamental flaw: the absence of meaningful refugee participation in design.
As stated by Abdi (2020), refugee participation in Kenyan’s humanitarian governance structures is often symbolic rather than substantive, with limited influence over actual program design.
Without community input, the assessment tools misinterpreted local coping mechanisms and overlooked informal survival strategies that families rely on daily. In contexts like Kakuma, vulnerability is not a fixed category but a fluid condition shaped by social networks, informal labor, remittances and shared resources.
As stated by the World Bank (2020), displacement responses are more effective when affected populations are treated as active partners rather than recipients.
They should shape exactly how criteria for selection in categorization should look like based on their lived experience in the refugee communities.
By ignoring this complexity, the program inadvertently misclassified households and redistributed assistance in ways that many residents experienced as unfair or inaccurate.
The consequences of these missteps extended beyond administrative confusion. On 21 July 2025, desperate refugees who had lost basic support gathered in protest outside the UNHCR compound in Kakuma camp. The clashes that followed led to the tragic and preventable death of one refugee. A program that was supposed to help people instead cost a human life.
A System Built On Control Rather Than Collaboration
Kakuma operates within a highly regulated humanitarian governance structure involving the Department of Refugee Services (DRS), UNHCR and implementing partners. While coordination is essential in large scale humanitarian settings, the current structure often results in over-centralization of decision-making power.
As stated by Krause (2016), refugee camps frequently reproduce colonial governance patterns where external actors maintain control over resources and decisions, limiting refugee agency.
Refugee Led Organizations (RLOs), despite being among the first responders in emergencies and deeply embedded in community networks, are frequently relegated to implementation roles rather than strategic ones.
As stated in the UNHCR (2020) engagement policy on RLOs, Refugee-Led Organizations should be meaningfully included in planning and decision-making processes.
Yet in practice, the acknowledgement is utilized operationally, but excluded institutionally.
The Illusion of Participation
In response to criticism, humanitarian agencies often point to consultation processes, town halls and community meetings as evidence of inclusion. However, in practice, these engagements frequently function as procedural formalities rather than genuine co-creation spaces.
As stated by Cornwall and Gaventa (2001), participation that is merely invited and controlled by institutions often serves legitimacy rather than empowerment.
Too often, consultations occur after key decisions have already been made. Community leaders are invited not to shape direction, but to respond to pre-designed interventions.
In Kakuma, this problem is very clear. Refugee leaders are often treated as information conduits; they're expected to pass messages and instructions down to the community, and send complaints or data back up to the agencies.
This makes accountability a one-way street: it flows upward to the humanitarian organisations, donors, and government, but there’s very little real back-and-forth with the people actually living in the camp. Leaders end up managing expectations and keeping order, instead of having real influence over the rules that affect daily life.
A clear example is the Shirika Plan. It was officially launched in March 2025 with big promises to transform refugee camps into integrated settlements, giving people more opportunities and self-reliance. More than a year later, many community leaders in Kakuma still don’t know exactly where things stand or what is really happening on the ground. If you ask them, the honest answer is often: “Your guess is as good as mine.” They simply haven’t been kept in the loop.
As stated by the Inter-Agency Standing Committee (IASC) guidelines, affected populations must be meaningfully engaged throughout the humanitarian cycle, not only at the consultation stage.
This form of participation risks becoming performative, creating the appearance of inclusion without transferring real power.
Rethinking Humanitarian Power: Beneficiaries to Co-designers
A fundamental shift is urgently needed. The principle of ‘’Nothing About Us Without Us’’ must move beyond rhetoric and become an operational standard in humanitarian governance.
As stated by Betts and Collier (2017), refugee systems fail when they exclude displaced populations from decision-making and rely excessively on external bureaucratic control.
This requires your distribution of power, not just participation.
Refugees must be positioned as co-designers of programs, not just recipients of aid. This means involving them at every stage of the humanitarian cycle: assessment, planning, budgeting, implementation and evaluation.
Towards a More Dignified Humanitarian Future
True humanitarianism is not defined by speed or scale alone, but by dignity, accountability and shared power. It requires humility from institutions that historically positioned themselves as sole-problem-solvers.
As stated by Zetter (2014), forced immigration governance systems are often fragmented and disconnected from local realities, weakening accountability and effectiveness.
Refugee communities in Kakuma and similar settings possess deep knowledge of survival systems, social organization and crisis adaptation. If humanitarian systems are to become truly effective, they must shift from designing for refugees to designing with refugees.
Only then can the system begin to move far; together.
About the Author
Reponse Kabizo is a refugee living in Kakuma Refugee Camp, Kenya. He is the Co-founder of Stop Child Abuse, a refugee-led organization, and works as a refugee advocate and journalist. He is passionate about ensuring refugees are not just beneficiaries, but active co-designers of solutions that affect their lives.