This blog was written by Abdimalik Farah, Research Officer, Human Development Theme, African Population and Health Research Center (APHRC).
Imagine having stones thrown at you on your morning commute to school. Or hearing live bullets cross the school compound while you try to comfort frightened children. Or being hospitalised after a student brings a knife to school the day after being disciplined. Now imagine that the only institutional response available to you is to submit a transfer request – one that could take years to be approved.
This is the reality for thousands of teachers working in Kenya’s refugee and host community schools in Garissa and Turkana Counties. And it is producing a quiet, preventable crisis.
What the evidence shows
The Teacher Well-being study surveyed 927 teachers across 74 schools in Garissa and Turkana Counties, with 105 qualitative interviews and 11 focus group discussions. Its findings on insecurity are stark.
Physical insecurity is not an exceptional event in these schools — it is a documented, recurring feature of teachers’ working lives. Teachers described being robbed at gunpoint, blocked on roads by armed individuals, and watching students scatter as firearms were discharged near school compounds. In Garissa, teachers described live bullets passing within the school compound. In Turkana, armed groups entered school grounds.
The psychological toll is severe. Teachers describe living in a state of chronic hypervigilance: “Any slight thing, we think it’s a bullet.” The study documents substance use, professional withdrawal and – in some cases – suicidal thoughts among teachers in these settings. This is not stress. It is trauma produced by the working environment.
And yet the institutional response to this trauma is a transfer request form.
A broken safety valve
Kenya’s Teachers Service Commission (TSC) requires teachers posted to hardship areas to complete mandatory service terms before a transfer can be approved. In practice, this means teachers facing credible, recurring threats have no fast route to safety. Transfer requests are denied for multiple years. The result is that the system’s de facto safety valve is resignation.
“When I wrote a resignation letter… they transferred me.” – Teacher, Turkana, 2025
This is not an isolated account. Multiple teachers across both counties describe the same pattern: resignation produces a transfer; a transfer request alone does not. When resignation becomes the only reliable escape route, the system is not protecting its most vulnerable teachers – it is selecting them out of the profession.
Non-TSC-registered teachers face this worst. With no formal employment protections, they cannot afford to resign. They remain, absorbing community hostility and armed violence as an unstated condition of service.
The cost to learners
Garissa and Turkana already have some of the most severe teacher shortages in Kenya. Pupil-to-teacher ratios reach 1:88 in Turkana host community schools; in camp settings, some teachers manage over 100 learners. Every teacher who resigns rather than transfers is a vacancy the system cannot fill – a classroom that may sit empty for months or years.
Over 47,000 learners in these schools pay the price. Teacher stability is not a welfare abstraction. It translates directly into educational continuity, relationship-building and the consistent delivery of Kenya’s Competency-Based Curriculum. Every resignation the system prevents is not only a welfare outcome – it is a learning outcome.
A policy window that must not be missed
The current legislative moment offers a genuine opportunity. The TSC Act 2024, the Basic Education Act 2024 and the National Teacher Education and Training Policy are all recently enacted or under active development. Kenya’s Shirika Plan is reshaping the operating environment for teachers in Kakuma and Kalobeyei.
A validation workshop held in April 2026 – attended by TSC County Directors for Garissa and Turkana and Ministry of Education representatives – confirmed that these gaps are recognised within the system. The policy acknowledgement exists. What is needed now is the formal instrument.
What needs to happen
Three changes are specific, actionable and achievable within existing legal authority:
- A formal insecurity exception clause in the TSC transfer framework. Any teacher who submits a transfer request citing credible, recurring physical threats – supported by an incident record – must receive a decision within 60 days. This can be operationalised through a TSC circular without waiting for full legislative revision.
- A mandatory insecurity incident register at county education offices. Head teachers in arid and semi-arid lands (ASAL) and refugee-adjacent settings should log insecurity incidents monthly. This creates the evidence base for emergency transfers, informs hardship designation reviews and makes invisible risks visible to national-level policy actors.
- County-level school safety infrastructure. Teachers need secure housing, reliable transport on documented high-risk routes and a joint school safety reporting mechanism between county education offices and local security agencies. Community hostility toward teachers must be classified as an education quality emergency, not merely a security matter.
What is at stake
The study’s composite intrinsic motivation index for teachers in these settings stands at 91% – one of the highest recorded in any comparable education context. These teachers are not leaving because they lack commitment. They are leaving because the system gave them no viable alternative.
“The school is the safest place so far. But ‘so far’ is not a policy. It is a warning.” – Female teacher, Turkana, 2025
A teacher who knows that a documented insecurity threat will produce a 60-day transfer decision – rather than a multi-year wait or a forced resignation – is a teacher who can remain in the profession while seeking safety. That distinction matters enormously in contexts where teacher supply is critically constrained.
These teachers show up every day under conditions that most employment frameworks would classify as unsafe. The minimum the system owes them is a transfer process that does not require them to sacrifice their jobs in order to reach safety.
