How RLOs in Kakuma Are Reimagining Learning
In the heart of Turkana County, in Kakuma refugee camp, where survival is shaped by scarcity and resilience, a quiet but radical transformation is underway. It isn’t led by international agencies or headquartered strategies. It’s being shaped by Refugee-Led Organisations (RLOs) that are not waiting for permission to lead.
At Cohere, we have the privilege of working alongside these RLOs as they reimagine what it means to educate, care for, and strengthen communities from within. Their work is not charity, it is resistance. It is the refusal to be reduced to a label. It is leadership, grounded in local wisdom, and fuelled by an unshakable belief in community.
Community-Rooted Education: A Bold Act of Agency
Education in displacement is often fractured – marked by broken systems, underinvestment, and short-term programming. But our RLO partners are creating alternatives: community-run Early Childhood Development (ECD) centres, remedial learning groups, and child-friendly spaces where learning isn’t just about literacy – it’s about healing and agency.
Take Kalobeyei Initiative for Better Life (Ki4BLI), founded by displaced youth who saw their the children within their community falling through the cracks. With support from Cohere and others, they now run an ECD centres that integrate literacy with Social Emotional Learning. Children learn to recognise their emotions, navigate conflict, and rebuild trust, skills essential in communities shaped by trauma and transition.
These aren’t programmes designed in boardrooms. They emerge from parent forums, youth gatherings, and everyday dialogue. This is what community-rooted education looks like: responsive, relational, and radically grounded.
Parental Engagement: The Heartbeat of Local Ownership
Several RLOs are also reshaping how we think about learning itself. They have begun training parents – many of whom never had access to formal education – as learning supporters. Through parent learning groups, refugee caregivers are exploring topics from play-based learning to mental health and child development.
The result is a shift in power. Learning no longer ends at the classroom door, it continues under the trees, by the cooking fire, and during walks to water points. Parents feel capable. Children feel seen. Communities become classrooms.
From Scarcity to Sustainability: Innovation in Crisis
In Kakuma, RLOs aren’t replicating broken systems, they are reimagining them. Friends of the Nature transforms agricultural waste into eco-briquettes, reducing deforestation while funding school meals. Solidarity Initiative for Refugees has established digital literacy hubs where youth can access learning, mentorship, and online job platforms. These spaces double as sanctuaries for creativity and healing.
With minimal funding and no cushion of institutional support, these groups are doing what others say is impossible. They are innovating not in spite of displacement, but through it.
Building from the Inside Out
Too often, the humanitarian system engages local actors as data sources or delivery agents, not as co-creators. Even when RLOs design effective interventions, they face structural exclusions: limited access to funding, restrictive legal status, and exclusion from key decision-making spaces.
Cohere’s mission is to challenge these norms. We support RLOs to access flexible resources, generate evidence, and build solidarity networks that shift who holds power. Our job is not to lead, but to accompany, to amplify refugee leadership and to hold the system accountable to the communities it claims to serve.
Despite decades of localisation rhetoric, most humanitarian funding still bypasses the very organisations doing the work. This must change.
The Future is Local
What’s happening in Kakuma is not just a story of service delivery, it is a blueprint for a different system. A system where those with lived experience are no longer invited to the table after the menu has been set, but are trusted to shape the agenda.
Refugees are not a burden to be managed. They are educators, builders, strategists, and leaders. They are showing us what’s possible. The question now is not whether they are ready to lead, it’s whether the system is ready to follow.
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