Intersectionality in Motion: Refugee Migration and Urban Food Security in Nairobi, Kenya

Research on African cities has often examined South-South migration and urban food security as separate issues, overlooking how migrants’ legal status, gender roles, and labour market participation jointly shape household food access. This paper applies an intersectional framework to analyze the food-security experiences of Somali migrants in Eastleigh, Nairobi. It builds on previous analyses of baseline vulnerabilities and pandemic-related shocks to highlight how intersecting social categories such as gender, documentation, education, household structure, and remittance flows create distinct patterns of hardship and adaptation. Evidence from 30 in-depth interviews shows that female-headed and newly arrived households experience compounded deprivation, while larger or better-connected families mitigate risk through remittance support. Persistent legal precarity and reliance on informal work reinforce inequalities in access to stable food sources. By integrating intersectionality into migration-food-security research, the paper identifies the structural constraints that shape migrants’ everyday lives and calls for multi-level governance approaches responsive to these overlapping inequalities in rapidly urbanizing African contexts.