Making Sure Stateless and Minority Populations Are Counted in the Kenyan Census

OSIEA, the AU Advocacy Program, and the Open Society Justice Initiative Citizenship & Equality program joined forces to ensure that statelessness and ethnicity concerns were raised in connection with the August national census in Kenya.

Select minority groups are often denied citizenship due to ethnic discrimination. The advocacy work prompted the Kenyan government declare optional the previously compulsory question requiring Kenyans to reveal their tribe. The government for the first time eliminated a cluster "others" which it previously consigned minority groups in.

The campaign generated a heated public debate on question of ethnicity, and citizenship rights of minority communities in Kenya. Newspaper editorials, opinions and news items demanding of the government to explain ethnic classification in the census documents were routinely published as the question of ethnicity, discrimination and exclusion of minority groups dominated radio and TV talk shows.

This follows sustained media advocacy after a civil society meeting on citizenship and statelessness convened by the Justice Initiative and OSIEA in Nairobi early this year. Articles and radio talk shows emphasized that given the national political tensions around ethnicity, the controversy around tribal affiliations and ethnicity may worsen as a result of a census which is perceived to favor some ethnic groups at the expense of others. As a result of increased awareness on the matter, minority groups threatened to boycott the exercise. Kenya's national census does not count citizens, instead it counts the numbers of people in each tribe only recognizing 42 tribes while ignoring many smaller communities not legally recognized as separate tribes.

The campaign has also drawn the attention of the government to the plight of Kenyans who due to systemic discrimination, lack national identity cards, hence could not present themselves to be counted for fear of arrest.  In this campaign, OSIEA, the Justice Initiative, and AU Advocacy aimed to persuade the Kenyan government to guarantee that the post-enumeration census report will reveal nationality of Kenyans and not their tribe.

In addition, the Justice Initiative and OSIEA plan to carry out an independent study on statelessness in Kenya to generate data on this issue.  This work feeds into a larger regional campaign by the AU Advocacy Programme for the passage of the AU Protocols on Freedom of Movement and Citizenship.