It was one morning in Kakuma, I was about to head out when I received a call. A close friend had left for Libya to attempt the Backway. No one from his family had any idea. After days of worry and searching the camp, they received word that he had left and was already in Sudan. The route was war-torn, still raw from the Sudan conflict. They were attacked. Most were killed. The rest were robbed. He lost everything he had saved to fund his journey.
Fortunately, a stranger took him in. He used that time to contact his family, the first time they’d heard from him since he disappeared. They were relieved and devastated in equal measure. They asked him to come back. He couldn’t. He had met others on the same path and continued — across the desert, in dire conditions. Only a few made it to Libya. He’s been there for months now, arrested twice by Libyan authorities following failed attempts to cross the sea.
At first I couldn’t believe it. I knew him. I knew that even when all doors closed, this wasn’t the door I expected him to choose. But when the truth settled, and after I heard everything he endured just to arrive in Libya, I couldn’t help but think — how deep does someone have to be failed to take that kind of route? I was thankful he was not lost. But thankful felt like too small a word for too large a failure.
He is not alone. Across Kakuma, young men and women — most of them high school graduates — are making the same calculation. Not because they are reckless. Not because they don’t understand the risk. But because they have done the math on every other option and found nothing. The Mediterranean remains the deadliest migration route in the world. In 2025 alone, at least 2,185 people have died attempting to cross it. Since 2014, over 80,000 people have lost their lives on migratory routes globally. These are not statistics about people who gave up. They are statistics about people who were given nothing to hold onto.
“How deep does someone have to be failed to take that kind of route?”
The policy failure is specific. Kenya’s categorization framework for refugees arrived without a Plan B. It assumed that business opportunities, livelihood programs, and eventual resettlement would absorb the thousands of high school graduates leaving camp every year. They don’t. Resettlement numbers remain critically low. Business programs reach some, but not everyone wants a market stall. Not everyone’s dream fits the bracket we’ve designed for them. And for those whose dream is a university education, the scholarship pipeline is broken in ways that go beyond funding.
Scholarships have become so sophisticated they lock out even the most qualified candidates. Some refugees have repeated their final exams — scored higher — and still been forgotten. Others with slightly lower scores carry exceptional potential that no rubric captures. We have been told this is a resource problem. It is not. It is a design problem.
And the design problem runs deeper than most are willing to admit. Solutions are still being built for refugees, not with them. Even in cases where refugees are consulted, the consultation is often surface-level — a focus group, a survey, a seat at the end of a table where the agenda was already set. Real co-design means starting from the problem as refugees experience it, not as organizations have defined it. It means asking a university-aspiring student what stands between her and that university — and then building the answer around what she says, not around what is easiest to fund.
Because the underlying issues are rarely what they appear to be from the outside. The scholarship gap is not just about money — it’s about recognition, about whether refugee qualifications are accepted, about whether a student without a permanent address can even complete an application. The livelihood gap is not just about jobs — it’s about dignity, about whether the opportunity on offer respects what someone has spent years working toward. Surface-level solutions address the visible symptom. The young man heading to Libya is not the symptom. He is the consequence of years of symptoms left untreated.
My friend is currently in Libya. Arrested. Waiting. Still alive. The families of the thousands who died on migratory routes last year cannot say the same about theirs. We cannot keep responding to these deaths with condolences while continuing to design futures that leave young refugees with nowhere to go but the sea.
The futures refugee students are fighting for are not out of reach. But they will remain out of reach until the people designing the solutions sit down — genuinely, not tokenistically — with the people living them. Fix the scholarship pipeline. Build university pathways that recognize the refugee journey. Stop asking young people to compromise their dreams in exchange for survival. Because when we do, some of them stop compromising. Some of them pack what little they have and head for Libya instead.
And some of them don’t make it back.
About the author
Mamuch Bey is a South Sudanese refugee, writer, poet, and advocate based in Kakuma, Kenya. He uses storytelling and innovation to amplify displaced voices and advance education access for refugee youth in East Africa. He is the Executive Director of Audread (Neurollect) and Project Lead at TEDI Africa.
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