Longitudinal Socioeconomic Study of Refugees and Host Communities 2022-2023

Wave 1

The survey has two primary samples contained in the ‘status’ variable: the refugee sample and the host community sample. Refugees were sampled from two frames, the UNHCR registration database proGres and the Socioeconomic Surveys (SES) conducted in Kakuma, Kalobeyei and Nairobi. ProGres holds information on all refugee and asylum seekers families in Kenya registered with UNHCR including their phone numbers and the approximate location, data on nationality. The second frame consists of the samples of the Kalobeyei SES (2018), Kakuma Refugee Camp SES (2019) and Urban SES in Nairobi (2020-21). It holds rich socioeconomic baseline data and is a subset of the first. In the first stage, a subsample of proGres families is drawn from the entire proGres frame using implicit stratification by sub-county and nationality. Notably, proGres families are not always the same as households defined in standard surveys. For K-LSRH, a household is defined as a “person or group of people living in the same compound (fenced or unfenced); answerable to the same head and sharing a common source of food/share cooking arrangement.” Meanwhile, proGres families refer to the group of people in which refugees are registered to UNHCR. A household can comprise of multiple proGres families and the selection probability has been adjusted accordingly.

In the second stage, an independent subsample was drawn from the SES frame for each of the strata with the existing SES. Households who had arrived in Kenya before the SES and who had not left the country, represented an overlap group which has a positive probability of being selected into the sample through both the SES frame and through proGres directly. For this subset of households, weights were adjusted using an overlapping frames correction.

Hosts were sampled using a two-step cluster design. The sampling frame of host households consists of communities living in close proximity to refugees who are potentially impacted by their presence. The host community of camp refugees in Turkana and Dadaab are defined as those living within a 15 km radius of the camp borders, while host communities of urban refugees are defined as neighborhoods hosting at least 10 percent of proGres families living in each city of the stratum including; Kayole, Eastleigh North, and Kasarani in Nairobi, Old Town and Majengo in Mombasa, and Lanet, Shabaab, and Langalanga in Nakuru. Sampling follows a two-step clustered design, whereby a set of Enumeration Areas (EAs) and replacement EAs is drawn with probability proportional to size (PPS) from the universe of eligible EAs. Subsequently, a listing exercise was carried out to eliminate ineligible households including households not living within the boundary of selected EAs and households not providing consent to the listing interview. Households where one member was registered with UNHCR as a refugee or asylum seeker were also not interviewed, to rule out overlap with the refugee sampling frame. In the second stage, for each selected EA, 10 households and a list of 5 replacements for the case of non-response was drawn using simple random sampling. This resulted in a sample of 2,000 households for the host community of camp refugees and of 1,500 households for the host community of urban refugees.

A representative respondent (RR) was randomly selected from among the household members aged 18 and above and administered a set of in-depth modules on employment and individual-level characteristics. In addition, the survey included a module on women’s empowerment, administered by trained female enumerators to randomly selected female respondents aged 15 and above. If the RR was a woman, the same respondent also completed the woman empowerment module; otherwise, a woman aged 15 years and above was selected among the women in the household based on simple random sampling. Finally, a module on child education and aspirations was administered to a cohort of upper primary school children and their main caregivers. One Child Respondent (CR) was randomly selected among 5th-grade students currently attending school of any age up to and including 17 years (to also capture over-age students) in selected households. The child’s main caregiver (CG) was also interviewed to capture parental aspirations and main barriers to education. The Caregiver refers to the household member responsible for making the educational decisions for the child. Unlike other modules, the Education Module was only implemented in the Kakuma, Kalobeyei, and Dadaab refugee strata and the Turkana and Dadaab host community strata.