Next steps towards self-reliance for refugees in Nairobi

This post is a follow-up to an earlier blog post entitled “First Steps Towards Self-Reliance for Refugees in Nairobi.”

How do refugees’ lives change during their engagement with RefugePoint?

The lives of Ariet* and her four children are dramatically different today compared to nine years ago, when the family fled their home in southern Ethiopia due to inter-communal violence. After initially fleeing to Addis Ababa, the family sought safety in the Kenyan capital of Nairobi, where Ariet struggled to support her children by making and selling beadwork.

When they joined RefugePoint’s Urban Refugee Protection Program (URPP) in 2022, Ariet’s household received food support, essential medical services, emergency cash, and assistance to help pay overdue rent. A livelihoods grant and business skills training meant that Ariet could start a business selling Ethiopian injera bread, which brings in about KES 15,000 (approx. $115) per month: just enough to afford at least two full meals a day, cover school fees for her school-aged children and to allow Ariet to save enough to cover basic needs for one month. The household graduated from URPP services last year, now that Ariet is able to meet her family’s basic needs. 

Every refugee’s story is unique, but Ariet’s shares some common themes with those of other refugees in Nairobi who have participated in the URPP, which provides holistic support, including food, rent, education support, essential household goods, counseling services, medical care, business development skills, and business grants.

This post shares a few key findings about how refugees’ lives change while receiving services through the program, which lasts on average about two years. An initial exploration of program data revealed that intake into the URPP makes a significant difference in the lives of most clients, even after the first six months. This article presents a further analysis of RefugePoint’s data, showing which types of vulnerability are most, and least likely to change, and extrapolating what this means for progress towards refugee self-reliance for refugees in Kenya. 

RefugePoint’s Urban Refugee Protection Program

Ariet and her children are among the more than 110,000 refugees and asylum seekers who live in Kenya’s urban areas, most in the capital city of Nairobi. Unlike refugees in camps, urban refugees are expected to meet their own basic needs. They often lack adequate legal protections and frequently struggle to access basic services, which are few and fragmented. 

The URPP provides a unique refugee-centered and holistic Self-Reliance Runway Approach that provides a concrete, measurable pathway for enhancing self-reliance. Through the URPP, RefugePoint identifies refugees facing extreme vulnerabilities, helps them stabilize, and addresses their social protection needs. This stabilization phase provides a ‘runway’ for refugees to eventually reach the point when they are ready to engage in economic pursuits and achieve a degree of self-reliance—that is, to earn sufficient income to cover their essential needs and improve their quality of life, without depending on assistance. The URPP works intensively with a core caseload of about 1,500 refugees annually.

Our primary tool for measuring impact is the Self-Reliance Index (SRI), the first-ever global tool for measuring the progress of refugee households toward self-reliance. It was developed jointly by members of the Refugee Self-Reliance Initiative with leadership from RefugePoint and the Women’s Refugee Commission. The SRI is now widely used in the sector and has been adopted by 69 organizations in 33 countries around the world. For this post, we used a purposive sampling technique to identify households that had been assessed multiple times on the SRI, resulting in a sample of 79 households that were part of the URPP between 2021 and 2024. 

Rising SRI scores show steps towards refugee self-reliance  

RefugePoint staff gauge the progress of households in the program towards self-reliance by administering the SRI at six-month intervals. The average household in our sample increased their SRI score substantially in the first six months of joining the program. As our clients are urban refugees facing extreme vulnerabilities, and RefugePoint is the first provider of any stabilization services whatsoever for most, this rapid initial improvement in scores makes sense. As the graph below shows, SRI scores tend to stabilize after that first six-month period, then jump upwards again once households around the two-year mark. This may be attributable to the influence of livelihoods business support, which tends to begin later once refugee households have established base-level stability in Nairobi. The overall trend is one of rising average SRI scores for refugee households over the course of participating in the URPP, showing positive steps toward self-reliance. 

N=79: SRI data extracted from Salesforce: Includes households complete/continuous SRI records from Baseline (SRI 1) to SRI 5.

How life changes for refugees enrolled in the URPP 

What does this positive trend in SRI scores actually mean for urban refugees, in terms of how their lives change in the course of the program? The SRI measures progress towards self-reliance in a variety of domains, including housing quality and security, food consumption, healthcare access, employment, perceptions of safety, and more. Looking at changes in the individual domains between the first and last SRI measurements of households in our sample, illuminates a few clear trends. Strikingly, almost all the domains showed improvement over time. The exception is the assistance domain, where receiving services, for example from RefugePoint, leads to a lower score on this domain. On all other domains, a positive change in score means better conditions and outcomes for these refugee households.