Kakuma's New Community Forum: Representation and participation in refugee-led research
Community Forum Meetings across countries are enforcing relevance and ensuring continuous meaningful representation and participation of the communities subject to the ASPIRE project.
In September 2024, the Aspiring for Peace and Inclusion Research (ASPIRE) project successfully held its first Community Forum Meeting in Kenya. The Community Forum Meeting marks a significant milestone in the ASPIRE project expanding to Kenya and will ensure that communities central to the project are meaningfully represented and actively engaged in larger decisions related to the research agenda.
These Community Forum Meetings will be held regularly in all research locations to engage community members from Kakuma Refugee Camp, Kalobeyei Refugee Settlement and Rhino Camp Refugee Settlement.
The refugee-led participatory approach is enforcing the relevance of the ASPIRE project so it reflects the aspirations, needs, and challenges of young South-Sudanese. The ASPIRE project is an ethnographically driven, long-term research initiative exploring how young South Sudanese refugees perceive and pursue opportunities for peace within their communities, while understanding young refugee men and women as change agents. The Community Forum Meetings ensure that the experiences of young refugees stay at the heart of the research and continues to do so throughout the project.
