1. Introduction
Kenya remains one of Africa’s largest refugee-hosting nations, accommodating over 869,000 refugees and asylum seekers as of late 2025 (UNHCR Kenya, 2025). About half of that number of people are women and girls, with many having to lead households as their male partners die, separate, or abandon them during displacement (Refugee Consortium of Kenya, 2024). The two main locations of the long-standing refugee settlement in Kenya, where there are mixed populations of over 730,000 people, are the Kakuma and Dadaab refugee camps that were established in the year 1992 and 1991 respectively. Although both camps are geographically close to each other and in the same national setting, they have significant differentiation in the demographic composition, cultural dynamics, and structures of operation, which creates different experiences among the women leading households within these camps.
This is a critical literature review of the available literature on women headed households in refugee camp contexts and specifically the Kenyan one. Based on the theoretical perspectives of the Sustainable Livelihoods Approach and Feminist Political Economy, the review charts vital debates along four thematic areas: displacement and household restructuring, gender-based violence and protection, economic participation, and livelihood strategies, and access to essential services. Through the synthesis of secondary sources such as peer-reviewed journal articles, institutional reports and policy documents, the review uncovers the strengths as well as the major gaps in the existing literature that this dissertation attempts to fill. The analysis highlights the value of comparative, gender sensitive studies in guiding humanitarian programming and policy in protracted displacement situations.
2. Women-Led Households in Displacement Contexts
Displacement is a basic reorganization of household structure and gender roles. In pre-displacement contexts, the traditional household structures in most of the home countries of Kenyan refugees arranged men as the breadwinners and women as caregivers. But conflict and forced migration are destabilizing these roles and often lead to women being de facto heads of their households. This shift creates not only chances of increased female decision-making power but also increased vulnerability to economic precarity and risks to protection (Kaaria & Murithi, 2025). The literature overall reveals that the compounding vulnerabilities experienced by female-headed households in displacement settings are the result of the interplay of gender, displacement and socioeconomic marginalization.
These dynamics are depicted through empirical research in the Kenyan context. The 2021 Refugee and Host Household Survey, which was surveyed in Nairobi, discovered that only six percent of refugee women were empowered in various aspects, such as agency over health choices, labor market integration, use of contraceptives, and being free of domestic violence (Kaaria & Murithi, 2025). Interestingly, independent household headship was linked with an increased chance of empowerment, showing that autonomous leadership might serve to empower women with greater power even in restrictive situations. But the World Bank Group (2023) also mitigates this observation by showing that, in contrast to women in monogamous marriages, women who had been divorced, separated, or widowed had a 23-percentage point lower probability of empowerment, which is the paradox of household headship and vulnerability.
Women also experience further mediated by household composition. Women with big families with more than one dependency such as young children and older adults are experiencing a severe shortage of resources, especially when the humanitarian aid dwindles. The dependency ratios of female headed households are generally more than those of male headed households, and this increases the economic burdens and makes women to have to make some coping mechanisms that might affect their long-term wellbeing (ACAPS, 2025). The literature recognizes a significant gap in the knowledge of how these domestic-level processes interplay with context-specific factors in the camp to generate varying results in various displacement contexts.
3. Gender-Based Violence and Protection Challenges
Violence against women is a widespread menace to the security and health of women in refugee camps. Structural factors of camp life such as overcrowding, lack of lighting, lack of sanitation facilities and economic desperation provide conditions in which sexual and gender-based violence thrives (Mugo et al., 2025). Women in charge of households lacking male counterparts are especially susceptible, since lack of male protection in the social structures that exist in patriarchy, and economic survival pressures, can force women to practice transactional sex or to enter into exploitative relationships. According to a study by Obara et al. (2025), refugee women are exposed to rates of gender-based violence that are about 20 percent higher than the host community populations, with the most common types of gender-based violence being physical abuse and forced marriage.
Although there is the presence of intervention mechanisms, the response infrastructure in Kakuma and Dadaab is poor. It is estimated that GBV Support Centres in Kakuma accept 15 to 20 cases per day, and adolescent girls are overrepresented among the survivors (Abdi, 2023). Nevertheless, there are still significant disparities between violence occurrence and the use of the formal response services, which can be explained by the stigma, fear of revenge, unawareness about the existing support, and the lack of trust in justice systems (Mugo et al., 2025). Protection systems at the community level, like traditional dispute resolution systems like the Somali Maslaha, are somewhat more accessible, but often give precedence to communal peace at the expense of the rights of an individual woman, which may also push survivors towards settlements that do not necessarily guarantee them safety (Karimi, 2024).
Intimate partner violence stands out as a notably important aspect of the protection situation. Research shows that prevalence rates of refugee women are 30-50 percent in some camp environments, and the problem is aggravated by displacement stress factors such as poverty, loss of social status, and unresolved trauma (Koigi, 2022). Females leaving abusive partners to form independent families may have avoided physical harm at the time, but still face the issue of social stigma and economic marginalization related to their marital condition. According to the literature, there is a gap in systematic comparative study on the environments of protection varying in camps, especially on how cultural norms, institutional responses, and agency of women interact in managing the protection issues.
4. Economic Participation and Livelihood Strategies
The marginalization of refugee women economically is a well-documented phenomenon in the literature. Formal employment opportunities are limited by regulatory barriers to movement and employments, non-recognition of foreign qualifications, and discrimination of the labor markets. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, 20 percent of refugees in Kenya could get employment, including self-employment, compared with 63 percent of Kenyan nationals, despite the 2021 Refugees Act, which theoretically allowed refugees to be more socioeconomically active (International Labor Organization, 2025). There are compounded barriers to women, and gendered analysis shows that they participate less in agricultural work and less likely to have access to formal financial services as compared to their male counterparts.
The informal economy is where livelihood strategies of women-led households are mainly concentrated. The most common strategy is petty trade, i.e. small-scale buying and selling of vegetables, charcoal, firewood, and household goods. But women traders are structurally disadvantaged by lacking capital to buy wholesale, limited movement to acquire markets outside the camp, storage facilities and competing with male traders with greater capital (Ahmed, 2025). The result of these constraints is thin profit margins which can barely support daily subsistence, and thus women-led households are in a desperate situation facing economic shocks like sickness, theft, or market failure.
Ironically, studies in Kakuma have found female-headed households to have a higher financial inclusion index compared to male-headed households, and this could indicate that financial need is a factor that compels women to resort to formal financial products to finance agribusiness or income-generating activities (Ahmed, 2025). Nevertheless, families that focused their spending on children education were less likely to use formal financial services, which means that there was a conflict between survival need and long-term investment in human capital. Vocation and skills training, such as tailoring, hairdressing, baking, and some others, have yielded both positive and negative outcomes, as the saturation of the market in the camp economies has constrained the translation of the skills obtained into viable livelihoods (International Labor Organization, 2025).
5. Access to Services and Resources
The most important issue of refugee households is food security. The decrease of ration to only 28 percent of minimum food standards by World Food Programme has resulted in wide-spread hunger and malnutrition (World Food Programme, 2025). The average incomes earned by households about KES 6,982 per month are significantly below the minimum expenditure basket of KES 16,424, forcing 74 percent of households to use negative coping strategies (ACAPS, 2025). Women as heads of households are often the most affected by food insecurity as they often forego their own food supplies to favor children, skip meals, eat less nutritious food, and borrow neighborhood food. The desperation created by insufficient food aid compels some women to adopt unhealthy measures to survive such as transactional sex and early marriage of daughters to cut down household spending.
There are additional difficulties in access to healthcare. Despite the fact that both camps offer primary healthcare services, the chronic shortage of medicines, equipment and personnel affects service quality. The level of reproductive health services such as ante-natal services, safe delivery, and family planning is poor even where the demand is high (CARE International, 2023). There is a dearth of mental health services despite the high levels of trauma, depression, and anxiety among displaced women. The water and sanitation systems overburden women as the main water carriers and hygiene caretakers, with long-distance water sources, inadequate latrines, and lack of privacy, as well as the danger of security in the areas with low-light sources, burden women daily. The education of children is a priority of the women heads of the household, but the financial limitations such as the fees of the schools, purchases of uniforms, and their meals often leave them with no choice but to make a tough decision between sending a girl or boy to school, and in some cases, gender biases result in girls being left uneducated (U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, 2024).
6. Theoretical Perspectives and Gaps in the Literature
There are two theoretical frameworks that provide a complementary power of analysis of women-led households in refugee camps. The Sustainable Livelihoods Approach offers a methodological system with which households can be studied to mobilize various capital resources, such as human, social, natural, physical, and financial capital, to follow livelihood strategies in vulnerability contexts and institutional settings (Makhanu, 2025). In the case of refugee contexts, this framework sheds light on how displacement destabilizes asset bases, how the organizations of camps are supportive or vicious in asset accumulation, and how households make resource decisions in a limited resource space. The female-headed households are usually characterized by lower access to various types of assets, such as low levels of formal education and health issues related to the human capital, poor bridging relationships with formal institutions related to social capital and low levels of saving and credit related to financial capital.
Feminist Political Economy is a complement to the livelihoods analysis because it anticipates gender to be an organizing principle in economic systems to influence the nature of power relations, resource allocation and institutional arrangements. This viewpoint demonstrates the extent to which the economies of refugee camps are gendered in that formal and informal regulations dictate who gains access to what and under what conditions and with what consequences (Makhanu, 2025). The disadvantages imposed on the mobility and economic engagement of women through discriminatory cultural practices, institutional favoritism of the male leadership of households in the distribution of aid, underrepresentation of women in the governance of the camp, and inadequate measures to curb gender-based violence, are all manifestations of structural gender inequalities that the livelihoods framework cannot fully depict. More importantly, Feminist Political Economy also focuses on the agency and resistance of women, as it acknowledges that women negotiate, challenge and even change subjugating gender norms through informal economies, support groups, rights movement, and inventive survival tactics.
The literature available supports a number of key gaps, which should be studied further. To begin with, there is very little comparative camp studies on women headed households. Most of the existing studies focus on single camps or generalize results across situations, hiding the individual camp issues that influence the experience of women. Second, the mediation of outcomes by institutions, cultural norms and individual agency as a factor to women household head needs more systematic review, especially considering that there are significant cultural and demographic variations between Kakuma and Dadaab. Third, little has been done to examine the implications of recent policy changes, especially the Shirika Plan by Kenya to transform refugees’ camps into integrated settlements on the livelihoods and security of women headed households (Department of Refugee Services, n.d.). Fourth, longitudinal views of the development of women house heads through time in protracted displacement are practically not found in the existing literature.
7. Conclusion
The scholarship in four interrelated areas of focus: displacement and household restructuring, gender-based violence and protection, economic participation and livelihoods, and access to essential services has been synthesized in this literature review to form a complete picture of the problems and remedies of women-led households in refugee camps. The review shows that women as household heads in protracted displacement environments are in a highly vulnerable situation at the junction of gender, displacement status, and socioeconomic marginalization, but also have agency in their own right in coping with limited environments. Both the Sustainable Livelihoods Approach and Feminist Political Economy offer the analytical concepts that enable capturing both the material aspects as well as the structural power relations that influence the lived experiences of women.
The gaps in the literature, especially the lack of serious comparative work with the camp, the fact that little attention is paid to the interaction of the cultural context and the institutional environment, and the recent policy changes are ignored, all indicate the topicality and need of a systematic comparative work on women-led households in Kakuma and Dadaab. The research can produce context-specific, evidence-based suggestions of gender-responsive humanitarian programming that meets the varied needs and ability of women in varied displacement environments in Kenya.
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