How a Refugee-Led Initiative is Empowering Girls in Kakuma, Kenya
Visuals: Photojournalism by Sophie Bouquillon
The attack came without warning in 2010, when Nhial Deng was living in the western Ethiopian town of Itang, helping his father provide for the family while his mother raised his younger siblings in a nearby village.
When armed militias descended on the area, Nhial fled. His father stayed behind to protect what they could not carry. Nhial was 11.
He walked for weeks, crossing more than 2,000 kilometres, until he reached Kenya’s Kakuma refugee camp — a sprawling settlement near the South Sudanese border that today holds 308,415 people, many fleeing war, famine, or political persecution across East and Central Africa.
When he finally arrived in Kakuma, he was placed with a foster family. Almost nothing felt familiar to him except stories.
“My father’s radio kept us connected to the world,” he recalls.”When everything else was uncertain, stories gave me hope.”
Caption: During high school, Nhial Deng began creating spaces for refugees to tell their own stories. Immersed in narratives of resilience and perseverance, he sought to amplify voices too often retold by outsiders, giving his community the tools to share their experiences on their own terms. Photo by Sophie Bouquillon for SheLeadsKakuma (2024)
In Kakuma, Nhial immersed himself in narratives of resilience, ingenuity, and perseverance shared by fellow refugees. Recognizing that outsiders often retold these personal accounts, he was determined to amplify the voices of those within the camp by allowing community members to share their own experiences in high school.
By December 2017, Nhial’s passion for storytelling had evolved into a broader commitment to peacebuilding through Refugee Youth Peace Ambassadors. Through peace dialogues, sports, mentorship programs, and social entrepreneurship workshops, the initiative reached over 15,00 young people by the end of 2023.
Nhial observed that the women and girls rarely occupied leadership roles or were fully engaged in activities. Disturbed by this disparity, he took a course in women’s rights in 2018. He later joined the Women Deliver Young Leaders Fellowship to deepen his understanding of system barriers and strengthen his commitment to feminist leadership.
After realizing that women and girls were often excluded from leadership spaces, Nhial Deng founded SheLeadsKakuma to challenge patriarchal norms and expand access to education and opportunities within the refugee community.
Nhial recognized that access to education, patriarchal norms, and lack of resources perpetuated inequalities. Determined to dismantle these structural barriers and ensure that everyone in the community had a role in building solutions, he established SheLeadsKakuma, an organization centred on women and girls at its core.
“If we want to promote gender equality, we must involve the entire community,” says Nhial.”We need men as allies, elders, women, community leaders, and local authorities.”
SheLeadsKakuma employs a collaborative model focused on actionable solutions, empowering young women and girls to design and lead their own programs.
Caption: Girls collaborate in groups during She Leads Kakuma’s Leadership workshop at the Lutheran World Federation (LWF) UN Youth Compound in Kakuma Refugee Camp, Kenya. Photo by Sophie Bouquillon for SheLeadsKakuma (2024)
“We see the young women and girls we work with as partners,” Nhial explains. “They are not just participants or beneficiaries; they’re the leaders designing the programming.”
This vision redefines leadership as a shared responsibility. By treating women and girls as equal stakeholders, SheLeadsKakuma fosters sustainable, community-driven development in which every voice is valued.
One of Nhial’s core leadership principles is active listening. He emphasizes that true empowerment isn’t about speaking for others but equipping them to speak for themselves.
“Listen, listen, listen,” he stresses. “Activists shouldn’t claim to be the ‘voice for the voiceless.’ Everyone deserves to have their own voice.”
For Nhial, education is foundational for empowerment, particularly in the context of scarce opportunities. By equipping girls with the skills to challenge societal norms, advocate for their rights, and lead within their communities, SheLeadsKakuma positions education as a catalyst for transformative social change.
“Education is the only path for refugee youth to build brighter futures,” he says. “For girls especially, it breaks cycles of gender inequality, poverty, and conflict.”
Caption: Portrait of Nhial Deng, Founder of SheLeadsKakuma. Photo by Sophie Bouquillon for SheLeadsKakuma (2024)
SheLeadsKakuma doesn’t just educate — it trains future leaders. Young women and girls develop initiatives addressing community challenges, such as establishing leadership clubs, running health awareness campaigns, and mentoring younger peers. In doing so, they become community advocates, using education as a platform to transform their realities.
“SheLeadsKakuma is creating a space where everyone feels welcome,” Nhial says. “We cannot build a world that works for everyone until everyone feels included.”
Nhial’s journey highlights the transformative power of storytelling and education. Guided by his vision, SheLeadsKakuma continues to grow, driven by the belief that genuine progress comes when all voices are elevated.
However, with diminished global aid, the future of grassroots, refugee-led initiatives like SheLeadsKakuma, which rely on international support to provide programming, is uncertain.
Recent geopolitical developments have plunged humanitarian aid into crisis for refugee camps. Under President Trump, the United States announced that it would scale back its contributions, which accounted for 43% of global humanitarian funding. Following suit, international aid budgets have been slashed by approximately 27% in Germany, 25% in Canada, and 19% in France, as reported by CNN and The New Humanitarian.
On the ground, the impact of these critical funding shortages was almost immediate. In May, the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) warned that refugees in Kenya faced heightened levels of food insecurity, prompting the agency to reduce food assistance to the lowest levels ever recorded. By June 2025, rations had fallen to just $5 per person per month (20¢/day) in August, “differentiated assistance”, which groups refugee households based on their “assessed vulnerability”, was implemented — leaving roughly one third of refugees with no food assistance at all.
Caption: Photos of international donors seen across Kakuma refugee camp in August (2025)
Shrinking, unpredictable aid swiftly pushed Kakuma households from chronic under-nourishment into a full humanitarian shock, as local credit and commerce collapsed, food insecurity and malnutrition intensified, and increasingly violent protests erupted.
“Less support will force refugees to make heartbreaking choices — parting with essential belongings, withdrawing children from school, or even a return to home countries despite the dangers,” said Baimankay Sankoh, WFP’s Deputy Country Director in Kenya, in a news release.
Differentiated aid may ration calories; it also rations futures. Each cut pushes girls from classrooms to care work, or queues, from speeches to survival. SheLeadsKakuma can teach confidence; it cannot substitute for lunch.
And still, hope lies with the young leaders of Kakuma as they continue to forge pathways of hope, demonstrating that even amidst adversity, determined communities can transform challenges into opportunities.
Through education, inclusive leadership, and community-driven initiatives, Nhial and Kakuma’s young leaders prove that a refugee camp can become more than a temporary sanctuary — it can be a launchpad for innovation, collective leadership, and thriving futures.
Reporting for this project was made possible by strategic funding from the Toronto Arts Council to support local capacity building around storytelling with emerging artists.
