When Borders Interrupt Participation: Kuku’s Proposal for Regenerative Futures in Kakuma

Kuku Alesam Majub had planned for months to attend the SoilTribes Bootcamp. His proposal, Grounded Futures: Refugee-Led Soil and Sustainability Action, was rooted in a clear and urgent vision: to transform the difficult conditions of Kakuma Refugee Camp into a living classroom for regeneration, food security, and community-led ecological repair.

But Kuku was unable to be physically present.

Restrictive border regimes, travel documentation barriers, and visa limitations connected to his refugee status in Kenya prevented him from travelling to the Bootcamp. In his own words, he was “deeply heartbroken” not to attend an event he had been preparing for, while also holding onto the hope that such limitations would not always stand in the way of refugees like him.

His absence was not a lack of commitment. It was the result of a political and administrative system that too often makes mobility conditional, unequal, and inaccessible, especially for people living in forced displacement.

A proposal grounded in Kakuma

Kuku comes from Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya, a place marked by extremely dry conditions, poor soils, and limited farming opportunities. Yet his proposal begins not from scarcity, but from potential.

In Kakuma, young refugees are already experimenting with composting, small gardens, cleaning initiatives, recycling, tree planting, and regenerative farming. Kuku’s idea is to connect these scattered efforts into a coordinated, community-led regenerative agriculture hub.

The goal is simple and powerful: waste becomes compost, compost restores soil, soil supports food, and food strengthens community resilience.

The proposal imagines Kakuma as a place where refugee youth and women are not passive recipients of aid, but leaders in environmental stewardship. Through training, coordination, peer learning, and local demonstration plots, the project would support refugees to build practical skills, restore degraded land, and generate new livelihoods.

Remote participation as resistance

Although Kuku could not attend in person, he continued to participate remotely. He remained engaged by email, refined his pitch, responded to feedback, and shared new details about the stakeholders who could help make the project possible.

This remote participation had limits. The Bootcamp was designed around in-person collaboration, collective exercises, co-creation, and informal exchange. These are difficult to reproduce from a distance, especially when the person whose lived experience anchors the challenge is absent from the room.

The group recognised this tension. Kuku’s context is specific, complex, and deeply personal. It would have been inappropriate to speculate too much or co-design on his behalf without him being fully present. His absence therefore, shaped the process, not as a minor logistical issue, but as a core political fact of the challenge itself.

The barriers that prevented him from travelling were not separate from the subject of his proposal. They were part of the same system of constraint: restrictions on refugee movement, limited access to rights, unequal access to resources, and the ongoing dependence of refugee communities on decisions made elsewhere.

Borders as a soil issue

Soil regeneration may seem, at first, far from the politics of borders. But Kuku’s case shows how deeply connected they are.

Regenerative agriculture depends on people being able to gather, learn, exchange, test, and build relationships of trust. It depends on mobility, participation, and recognition. When restrictive visa policies prevent refugee innovators from entering the spaces where decisions, partnerships, and resources are negotiated, they do more than exclude individuals. They weaken the possibility of community-led transformation.

Kuku’s challenge is not only environmental. It is also social and political.

It asks what it would mean for refugee communities to reclaim agency over land, food, waste, knowledge, and the future. It asks how climate resilience can be built in places shaped by displacement. It also asks whether international programmes are prepared to confront the border regimes that limit the participation of the very people they aim to support.

A network for regeneration

The proposal identifies a realistic and promising network of potential collaborators in Kakuma and Kalobeyei, including Resilience Action International, Kalobeyei Initiative for Better Life, Ndakafua Youth Initiative, Lutheran World Federation, and the Norwegian Refugee Council.

Together, these actors could help define shared objectives, map existing programmes, identify youth and women-led groups, and support the creation of a small demonstration plot. This plot would serve as a practical site for composting, raised beds, agroecology, and soil restoration.

From there, the project could grow into a hub for workshops, peer learning, community reflection, and documentation. Its long-term ambition is not only to improve soil health in Kakuma, but to create a model that other refugee communities could adapt.

From exclusion to responsibility

Kuku’s absence from the Bootcamp should not be treated as an unfortunate footnote. It should be understood as a challenge to the design of international collaboration itself.

If programmes invite refugee-led ideas but cannot ensure that refugee participants can move, speak, meet, and participate on equal terms, then inclusion remains incomplete. If borders prevent people from presenting their own solutions, then institutions must take responsibility for changing how participation is organised, funded, and defended.

Kuku’s proposal offers a vision of regeneration under difficult conditions. His experience also reminds us that regeneration is not only about restoring land. It is about restoring agency, dignity, and the right to participate.

In Kakuma, waste can become soil, and soil can become hope. But for that hope to travel, the people carrying it must be allowed to move too.