By Wahome Ngatia
There is a particular kind of silence that costs lives. Not the silence of ignorance, but the silence of those who know exactly what is wrong, who have the relationships and the community trust to say so — and yet cannot, because the money that keeps their organisations alive comes with an unspoken condition: stay in your lane.
This is the quiet crisis at the heart of Kenya’s humanitarian architecture, and a landmark March 2026 working paper from ODI Global’s Humanitarian Policy Group (HPG), produced in partnership with Oxfam Kenya and drawing on extensive field research across Kenya’s arid and semi-arid lands (ASALs), names it with rare candor. The paper — Governing Inequality: Kenya’s State, Aid Politics and Perpetual Humanitarian Crisis — is authored by Zainab Moallin, Dahir Korow and Dustin Barter, and represents some of the most unflinching analysis of Kenya’s humanitarian and governance failures in recent memory.
The Trap Has a Name: NGOisation
The report’s most arresting observation concerns what it calls the “NGOisation” of Kenyan civil society — a process by which grassroots organisations and advocacy movements gradually transform into service-delivery vehicles, shaped less by the communities they serve and more by the funding architectures that sustain them. Donor frameworks that reward measurable outputs, rapid delivery and technical interventions have quietly redirected civil society away from the politically inconvenient work of demanding accountability, combating corruption and confronting structural inequality.
The consequences are profound. Organisations that once mobilised around democratic reform and human rights have pivoted to climate adaptation, public health and water and sanitation — not because these needs are unimportant, but because that is where the funding is. As one INGO interviewee in the report observed plainly: “He who pays the piper, decides the tune.”
This is not a uniquely Kenyan phenomenon, but its costs in Kenya are catastrophic. According to the Kenya Human Rights Commission, civic space in the country has been systematically shrinking, with CSOs facing bureaucratic harassment and legislative threats including proposed amendments to the Public Benefits Organizations Act. The result is an NGO-state-donor ecosystem in which civil society plugs humanitarian gaps while the deeper political wounds — corruption, inequality, marginalisation — fester untreated.
The Numbers the State Does Not Want You to See
The report’s financial data is staggering. In 2024, illicit financial flows — corruption, tax evasion and related illegal activity — drained an estimated US$1.5 to 1.8 billion from Kenya’s economy. International humanitarian aid to the country in the same year stood at approximately US$400 million. In plain terms, what Kenya loses to corruption alone is nearly four to five times what the entire international humanitarian system spends trying to address the resulting suffering.
Meanwhile, the World Food Programme spent US$174 million in Kenya in 2024, nearly six times what the Kenyan government allocated to its own flagship Hunger Safety Net Programme (US$30 million). From 2010 to 2024, an average of 92% of all international humanitarian assistance flowed directly to UN agencies and international NGOs. Local and national organisations never received more than 3% directly in any given year.
These are not abstract statistics. Behind them are the approximately 3 to 3.5 million people currently in humanitarian need across Kenya’s ASALs — communities whose vulnerability was engineered across decades of deliberate state neglect, from colonial-era “closed districts” to post-independence policies that explicitly redirected development resources away from arid regions deemed economically unproductive.
A State That Chooses Not to Lead
The report is careful to distinguish between incapacity and unwillingness. Kenya, it argues, has the institutional architecture, the growing revenue base and the technical capacity to lead its own crisis response. What it demonstrably lacks is the political will. Disaster management decisions are routinely shaped by patronage rather than need. Emergency declarations come not when early warning systems trigger — but when people are already dying.
Kenya’s devolution process, launched after the 2010 constitution, has delivered genuine improvements: localised early warning systems, county-level disaster frameworks, and in some counties, genuinely participatory governance. But devolution has also, as the report grimly notes, “devolved corruption” — with county tenders becoming battlegrounds for clan and political interests, and resource allocation guided more by the infamous “it’s our turn to eat” mentality than by evidence or equity.
The country loses more than US$4 million per day to corruption. The equalisation fund meant to bridge historical disparities between counties receives just 0.5% of government revenue.
What Must Change
The report’s recommendations are direct. For the Kenyan state, the ask is fundamental: develop and implement serious anti-corruption plans, increase county budgets for crisis preparedness and response, and — critically — respect civic space rather than suppress it. The National Disaster Risk Management Bill, already passed by parliament, must receive presidential assent. Illicit financial flows must be addressed not as a peripheral governance issue but as a core humanitarian emergency.
For civil society actors, the call is to reclaim assertiveness: to demand that international partners align with local strategies rather than impose their own, and to build broader coalitions that connect humanitarian response with tax justice, structural inequality and political accountability.
For donors, the message is urgent: stop funding cycles that perpetuate dependency and depoliticise the very actors capable of holding Kenya’s state to account.
Who Wrote This Report — and Why It Matters
ODI Global is one of the world’s foremost independent development research institutions, whose Humanitarian Policy Group has shaped global humanitarian policy for decades. Oxfam Kenya has been a long-term partner in building locally led humanitarian response across the ASALs, including through its foundational support for the ASAL Humanitarian Network. The report is part of a broader HPG comparative series spanning Indonesia, the Philippines, Myanmar and Somalia.
Conclusion: The Silence Must Break
Kenya’s perpetual humanitarian crisis is not a story of insufficient international generosity. It is a story of governed inequality — a political choice, repeated across administrations, to allow the most vulnerable to remain vulnerable. Civil society organisations stand at a crossroads. They can continue to be well-funded, technically proficient and politically mute. Or they can risk the discomfort of speaking truth, even when the funders prefer silence.
The communities in Turkana, Wajir and Mandera are not waiting for another working paper. They are waiting for someone with resources, relationships and voice to finally refuse to be quiet.
That someone is you.
