Our Core Mandate

Forced migration, especially in situations of war and violence, has substantial impacts on the health and the general welfare of refugees. Women may be at particularly high risk for vulnerability due to the subordinate role of women in many cultures. Power imbalances are prevalent with respect to reproductive rights and sexual relations. In addition, refugees often represent one of the weakest and most vulnerable members of a society and more often than not, can’t decide upon the context and circumstances of their lives.

According to UNHCR reports, there estimated over 100,000 refugees in the city of Nairobi alone. Yet despite this significant presence, international aid agencies have only recently begun to address the needs of urban refugees. The often-cited ‘invisibility factor’ may have made it easier to ignore them. Like self-settled refugees elsewhere, those in Nairobi are living and working among the host community. They are geographically dispersed across the area, and many are mobile, moving between the city, the camps and even their country of origin. They may also take on different identities depending on the context, and this makes it harder to see them.

In the city, the poorest refugees are more marginalized, vulnerable and at risk than their poor Kenyan neighbors. Many are double migrants: first, they leave countries in conflict, and second, they leave or avoid the camps. In Nairobi, they may be escaping forced marriages or clan conflicts that cross the border, as well as the hot and arid climate coupled with lack of economic opportunities in the camps. Their vulnerability is aggravated by their lack of legal status. They do not have the same rights as refugees in the camps, such as to documentation, movement, food, healthcare or protection. While they nominally have the same access as Kenyans to public schools and hospitals in Nairobi, they do not have a recognized political voice. As a result, they are not able to transform their nominal rights into real, exercised rights.

Safe Womanhood and Safeway Medical Clinic therefore ensures that the refugee women and their children have their plight addressed principally in terms of medical and social concerns. Our approach follows a feminist and social model of health, taking into consideration the social, political and economic conditions which circumscribe immigrant and refugee women’s experiences of health and well-being.