Blog Series on the Shirika Plan: PART I The Origins and Promises of the Shirika Plan. 

On March 28, 2025, President Ruto launched the Shirika Plan at State House, Nairobi, declaring a “homegrown solution” to the complex challenges posed by long-term displacement in Kenya. The Plan has attracted both global praise and domestic skepticism, positioned somewhere between a national strategy and a political statement. 

In this first of a four-part series, we explore the origins and promises of the Shirika Plan: what it is, what it isn’t, and what it signals about the future of refugee governance in Kenya.

PART I: The Origins and Promises of the Shirika Plan. 

March 28, 2025, Statehouse – President Ruto launches the Shirika Plan. It reads somewhere between a political manifesto and a national strategy: a blueprint for transforming Kenya’s refugee camps into “integrated settlements” and advancing the socio-economic inclusion of both refugee and host communities. According to the Ministry of Interior and National Administration, it aligns Kenya’s Vision 2030, Bottom-Up Economic Transformation Agenda, and commitments to the Global Compact on Refugees (GCR) 2018, to join-up parallel approaches to civic and humanitarian service provision. 

Why not call it a policy? Because it’s not anchored by a legal framework, though it gestures toward the Refugees Act 2021 and the Comprehensive Refugee Response Framework (CRRF), and it hasn’t gone before Parliament. It being just a plan and not a policy matters because it limits its authority, enforceability, and long-term impact. Unlike a policy, which is formally adopted, legally binding, and often tied to budgets and institutional accountability, a plan is typically aspirational and often lacks buy-in or the mechanisms needed for implementation. This means the Shirika plan, while valuable for setting direction, may struggle to influence action or survive political or leadership changes unless it is formally integrated into policy frameworks.

In other words, what the Shirika Plan  is, is a mirror held up to shifting global dynamics around refugee reception, and a signal of renewed commitment to what Ruto calls “home grown” responses to “increasingly acute, protracted, complex and dynamic” crises, borrowing language from the African Union’s vision of “African solutions to African problems.” And in Kenya, the crises are protracted and complex indeed. The country currently hosts about one million foreign nationals, at least 47% of whom are registered refugees. Some government sources now suggest the number is closer to 800,000. 

Since Somalia’s civil war began in 1991, the Dadaab camp complex in Garissa County has offered refuge, not only from conflict, but from severe drought, famine in 2011, and the devastating El Niño floods of early 2024. Kakuma refugee camp in Turkana County was originally established to home thousands of children who were orphaned or separated from their families during the second Sudanese Civil War (1983-2005). It has also hosted refugees from Somalia, Ethiopia, Rwanda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo since the 2000s, as well as South Sudanese refugees following the 2013 South Sudanese civil war. Urban centers like Nairobi and Mombasa host approximately 12% of all refugees in Kenya. 

Adding to the complexity are tightening border controls, fewer avenues for asylum, scaled-back resettlement programmes, and withering aid budgets in the Global North. With fewer pathways for refugees to permanent status or rights, local integration has taken center stage as a ‘durable solution’. The Plan, therefore, represents the intent to disentangle refugee governance in Kenya from the international aid system and transition towards a replicable, state-led, long-term approach. 

At the international level, donor enthusiasm is high. The World Bank, UNHCR, and EU are all backing the Shirika Plan as a model for other displacement-affected countries. It comes after years of threats made by the Kenyan government to shut the camps, the latest being in 2021 where it issued the UNHCR with an ultimatum to close shop in two weeks, citing security concerns as the driving factor, though this was blocked in court and alternative solutions pursued. 

However, many civil society organisations, including Haki na Sheria, remain sceptical, interpreting it as a resource mobilisation tactic (positioning Kenya as a reform-minded partner to attract donor funding) and viewing the Plan less as a genuine push for refugee integration and more as a strategic move to unlock international financing. Despite the rhetoric of inclusion, the focus remains on optics and fundraising rather than long-term structural change for refugees and host communities.

But does the Shirika Plan truly represent a break from past approaches or is it simply a rebranding of familiar ideas? For more, read Part II.