Kenya: Building Capacities for a Coordinated Border Management

On 24-25 April 2018, 23 Kenyan border officials attended a training on Coordinated Border Management (CBM) to ease and improve the immigration processes. CBM focuses on enhancing coordination and collaboration among governmental agencies, and between governmental agencies and non-state actors. The training was provided by IOM as part of the Better Migration Management Programme (BMM). The topics covered conceptualisation and operationalisation of coordinated border management in Kenya, experiences, and challenges in implementing coordinated border management, irregular migration, goods movement and concealment of contrabands, border community engagement and integrity, as well as effective team building.

The participants came from the Kenyan counties bordering Ethiopia and Somalia, where irregular migrants often cross the borders. The training objective was to identify and assist vulnerable migrants, refugees, and trafficked persons as well as to determine cases of border crimes in order to start investigations against smugglers and traffickers. The participants represented a variety of governmental agencies relevant to border management, such as Immigration Department, Port Health Department, Kenya Airport Authority, Intelligence Service, Police Service, among others.

Following the training, two days were dedicated to activities with the local community of the Moyale border. The idea was to introduce the concept and objectives of CBM to the community and engage the people in its implementation. The community meetings attracted over 270 participants including youth, elders, female leaders, union members, the interfaith council, chambers of commerce as well as local NGOs. The Moyale Border Management Committee was thus encouraged to move the coordination to the grassroots level by providing training to all its members and to the community via community engagement initiatives in order to achieve an all-inclusive coordinated border management.

Two other training sessions on CBM have been conducted within the framework of BMM. These took place in Namanga and Kisumu, which are hot spots for irregular migration in Kenya as well. BMM also conducts further training to improve migration management in Kenya, such as training on document examination and fraud detection to counter human trafficking and smuggling.