Exploring Barriers to Accessing Undergraduate Education Scholarships for Refugees in Kakuma, Kenya: A Mixed-Methods Study

Abstract

Background: Access to higher education for refugees remains profoundly unequal, yet limited research has examined how barriers interact at the point of undergraduate scholarship application in protracted displacement settings. This study investigated the barriers refugees in Kakuma, Kenya, face in accessing undergraduate scholarships and identified interventions that could improve equitable access. Methods: A descriptive mixed-methods design was employed. Quantitative data were collected through questionnaires administered to 78 refugee youth, while qualitative data were generated through 12 semi-structured interviews with applicants and scholarship-support actors. Two checklist items had 75 valid responses because of item nonresponse. Quantitative data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, and qualitative data were analyzed thematically and integrated through triangulation. Results: The most frequently reported barriers were lack of mentorship and application guidance (74.7%), lack of identification documents (73.3%), and stiff competition for limited opportunities (72.0%). More than half of respondents also reported inadequate awareness of scholarship opportunities (57.3%) and limited access to devices or internet connectivity (54.7%). In addition, 56.4% had never received scholarship-related guidance. Qualitative findings showed that these barriers were cumulative rather than isolated. Documentation bottlenecks, fragmented information flows, digital application burdens, and weak interview preparation often filtered out otherwise capable applicants before they could compete on merit. Conclusion: Scholarship exclusion in Kakuma is best understood not simply as a scarcity problem but as a capability-conversion problem in which academic aspiration and prior attainment do not readily translate into viable applications without informational, documentary, digital, and relational support. Improving access therefore requires more than expanding opportunities alone; it also requires documentation support, localized scholarship information systems, structured peer mentoring, digital application assistance, and more context-sensitive selection processes.