Critical perspectives on the use of technology with refugees and displaced communities: The case of Dadaab

Dadaab Refugee Complex hosts refugees from the Horn of Africa and the Great Lakes region. According to a UNHCR (2023) report, at 31 January 2023 Dadaab refugee camps were host to a total population of 233,828 registered refugees and asylum seekers, representing 41% of the total recognized forcibly displaced people in Kenya. This paper will explore Dadaab as the context for connected learning in addition to the author’s first-hand accounts. The author provides a reflexive account of the perspectives of refugees in Dadaab refugee camps and Dadaab host-communities on the role of higher education for individual and social transformation, and how technology could be embraced to leverage learning despite challenges to the access and use of the internet, and computers. In this paper, the author makes a reflexive account of the role of education in transforming refugee learners and communities, and how technology was employed, albeit with challenges, to connect Dadaab with other higher education institutions within and beyond Kenya’s boundaries. The author is further concerned with how technology in higher education in crisis contexts is conceived as the agent that builds networks of scholars, generates connections for development, and promotes exchange of knowledge and ideas among students and faculty across all geographical borders.