Legal Aid for Urban Refugees
One of the most essential components of RefuSHE’s holistic model is the legal aid and support we offer our beneficiaries. Urban refugees often face serious legal and protection issues leaving them vulnerable to abuse, exploitation, and detention. Without proper legal documentation, refugees face restricted access to services and activities that require an official identity document, such as banking, healthcare, education, and employment. For separated, orphaned, and unaccompanied female refugees, the journey to complete legal status and safety can be even more complicated to navigate. Few organizations provide legal services to refugees, especially at an affordable rate, and the ones that do are often limited to immigration matters.
Our legal team dispenses legal advice, assists in the acquisition of necessary identification documents with the Department of Refugee Services, helps explain the process by which refugees can obtain registration information, renew their documents, and apply for work permits, as well as trains beneficiaries in various laws and emerging practices within the asylum space. We ensure that the girls and young women in our care have the information, legal support, and accompaniment they need to secure their futures.
One of the biggest challenges our legal team faces is a lack of financial and human resources. Our team is small and responsible for providing legal aid to girls on our campus and women we serve in Nairobi’s broader refugee community. A typical day for the legal team involves attending meetings with RefuSHE staff and referral organizations, responding to Case Management emails, attending to beneficiaries’ queries on legal matters, and traveling to the field when necessary.
Much like our Case Management team, the legal team ensures that a girl is assisted from the day she arrives on campus to the day she exits into the community or is eventually resettled. We provide registration advice, help schedule Refugee Status Determination (RSD) interviews, and offer continued counsel on changing refugee laws that may affect the rights and lives of the young women we serve. We also partner with a variety of community-based organizations and government agencies to support vulnerable and unaccompanied refugee girls, urban refugee women, and their children. While we do not process resettlement applications ourselves, we do work closely with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and a suite of local referral partners who specialize in resettlement to help them prepare them for resettlement interviews, background, medical, and security checks, and arrival country procedures.
When asked what motivates her to work at RefuSHE, Legal & Advocacy Manager Joan Nyongesa says that she is inspired by, “the changes I see in many of the beneficiaries who have passed through RefuSHE’s programs and the fact that RefuSHE provides a wide range of services. Our holistic model gives a feeling of satisfaction.”
In the future, we hope to expand and grow our legal aid services to include representing beneficiaries in court and hosting legal aid clinics in the community to reach more refugees outside of our on-campus programs.