About 600 birth certificates have been recently issued to children from the stateless Shona community in Kenya for the first time.
The Shona community arrived in Kenya from Zimbabwe as Christian missionaries in the 1960s. They carried Rhodesian passports and were registered as British subjects. After Kenya’s independence in 1963, they had a two-year window to register as Kenyans, which many missed, rendering them stateless.
“This is how statelessness happens,” says Wanja Munaita, a protection officer with UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency. “At the time, members of the community didn’t know they could or even needed to register.”
Without proof of nationality, the Shona and other stateless communities were unable to fully access basic rights like education or health insurance. They could not travel, own property, be formally employed or access financial services, among other rights enjoyed by Kenyan citizens.
The move by the government to issue birth certificates has been hailed as an important step towards ending statelessness for the community of around 3,500, half of whom are aged under 18.
UNHCR is working closely with the government and civil society in Kenya to resolve statelessness. In 2016, around 4,000 Makonde were recognized as the 43rd tribe of Kenya, a major breakthrough.
“The moment you have statehood, you qualify for protection, you have a government that you claim and that claims you and that has the first obligation to protect you as a human being,” says George Kegoro, Executive Director of the Kenya Human Rights Commission, which has been working closely with UNHCR to advocate for stateless communities.
An estimated 18,500 stateless people currently live in Kenya. This includes different groups of stateless people of Pemba and Shona origin, as well as groups of individuals of Burundian, Congolese, Indian and Rwandan descent.
Original source: UNHCR
Published on 02 August 2019
