Kenya: Hiding in Plain Sight - How Women Survive Kenya's Dadaab Refugee Camp

Dadaab, Kenya — Under the threat of sexual violence, women - and especially "minority" women - have learnt to become invisible.

"I'm hiding" was what one woman told me when I asked what she does most days inside the world's longest-running refugee complex.

She is Somali, in her thirties, a single mother. She has lived in Dadaab's Dagahaley camp for 19 years: hiding from the men in the water queue; from the humanitarian rosters that fix her in place; from the night, when the walk to the latrine becomes a risk she calculates.

Dadaab is 35 years old this year. It was established in a remote corner of northeast Kenya to shelter Somalis fleeing civil war, and then drought. The Kenyan government - despite its hospitality - has always insisted it was temporary and steadfastly refuses to permit anything resembling permanence.

That means no durable housing; no street lighting; no locks for peoples front doors or land titles; no infrastructure that would concede the complex is a city - even though it is home to more than 400,000 people.

I interviewed 29 women across Dadaab's three camps of Dagahaley, Ifo, and Hagadera in March 2025. I deliberately oversampled what Dadaab's administration classifies as "minorities" - South Sudanese, Ethiopian, Burundian, Rwandan, Congolese - and one Kenyan Somali from the host community born inside the camp.

These nationalities make up roughly four percent of Dadaab's population. They are also the women most exposed to the camp's sexual and gender-based violence - and the ones its official picture renders least visible.

Urban scholarship has long celebrated what displaced people build: the markets, the schools, the kinship networks, the improvised infrastructures that bloom in the gaps of failed planning.

There is truth in that. But it obscures something else. In Dadaab, the women I worked with were not always building. Often, they were subtracting, withdrawing, erasing: Visibility itself had become dangerous.

I documented four modalities - one specific to minority women, three shared by all.

The first is religious passing. Dadaab is overwhelmingly Muslim and non-Muslims are widely treated as unclean. Christian women in particular are assumed to be prostitutes. The hostility is not only male-generated. I had expected solidarity among women across religious lines and found very little.

The exclusion is also economic. Muslim traders and customers tend not to buy from non-Muslims, so a Christian woman who tries to make a living by trading finds no market for what she sells. Her livelihood narrows to almost nothing. So she p