After decades of widespread discrimination against Muslims, Nubians and other minorities, Kenyan President William Ruto signed an executive order in February 2025 to abolish the system that barred millions of people from getting identification documents.
Ruto’s order formally directed that ID vetting committees be dismantled in Kenya’s border counties, where they were first established to block efforts by minorities to get identification documents.
Citizens should “feel like Kenyans without any discrimination,” Ruto said during the signing ceremony.
It was a watershed moment for the estimated 5 million Kenyans who couldn’t get a basic identity card without facing a vetting committee. Without an ID, a Kenyan can’t get a birth certificate for their child, apply for many formal jobs, inherit land or even get a phone line. The problem was intergenerational: Children were denied birth certificates because their parents didn’t have IDs, and the cycle began again.
For most Kenyans, getting an ID was straightforward and took just a few weeks, but the ID vetting committees routinely delayed ID applications by years or even decades. They grilled people about irrelevant personal details and even rejected applicants on the grounds that the process had taken too long — a process that the committees intentionally lengthened.
Ruto’s executive order unlocked the potential for minorities specifically in border areas to fully engage in daily life, including the opportunities to which they’d always been legally entitled.
The order came after a years-long campaign by tens of thousands of Kenyan citizens who had worked with community paralegals to get their ID cards.
“We asked every one of them: Would you join a movement to secure an inclusive ID system for all?” said Namati CEO Vivek Maru.
That movement became the #MyIDMyRight campaign. Led by a group of nonprofit legal aid organizations that are supported by Namati, they lobbied politicians, launched media campaigns and appeared on television.
Among the people leading the movement was Mariam Ramadhan, a Nubian woman who tried at least five times, beginning when she turned 18, to get an ID document. Each time, officials invasively interviewed her, demanding details about her life that were irrelevant to her application.
Frustrated and afraid, in 2014 Mariam went to the Nubian Rights Forum, a Namati partner organization that deploys paralegals to help people navigate legal quagmires. There, she learned the law and how to use it — and applied her knowledge at her next vetting committee interview.
Finally, at 38 years old, she got her ID in late 2020.
“The process was long and hard, but with a paralegal by my side I felt like I had a second chance,” Mariam said.
Mariam and tens of thousands of others like her propelled the movement. Together, they attended forums and agreed to have their stories featured publicly by Namati and its partners.
Slowly, pressure on the government built.
In 2022, presidential candidates acknowledged for the first time that the system needed change. Ruto’s party listed the issue of ID discrimination as a critical action point in its platform. By 2024, Ruto declared that vetting committees should be dissolved. For the first time, a Kenyan president publicly acknowledged that the system was unconstitutional and discriminatory.
Ruto’s 2025 executive order, Namati CEO Vivek Maru said, “is as historic a milestone in Kenya as the overturning of U.S. segregation in Brown v. Board of Education.”
The Nubian Rights Forum was among a group of nonprofit legal aid clinics that began to work on the issue more than a decade ago. Over time, paralegals from Haki Centre, Pastoralists Rights and Advocacy Network (ParaNET), the Pastoralists Women for Health and Education and Haki na Sheria Initiative, all supported by Namati, helped about 30,000 people secure IDs.
As they helped those people move through the ID vetting process, they collated stories like Mariam’s to assemble a dataset demonstrating just how widespread and severe the problem was. The length of processing periods, demands for excessive documentation, the specific questions asked by vetting committee officials — everything was tracked and showed how minorities were treated differently from other Kenyans.
That data became evidence that showed the government’s failure to ensure equitable treatment of all Kenyans. It was shared widely across Kenya as the #MyIDMyRight built strength and was instrumental in the eventual dismantling of the vetting committees.
Discriminatory systems don’t change overnight. The discriminatory vetting process remains in place in many areas where Ruto ordered that they should be dismantled. Paralegals, alongside Mariam and others like her, are pushing to ensure the order is implemented in those places, as well as throughout Kenya.
They’re facing new challenges: As Kenya’s 2027 presidential elections approach, at least one candidate has accused the government of giving and even selling IDs to foreigners to gain voters. Pundits are questioning whether the vetting process for getting an ID needs to become more rigid.
But the #MyIDMyRight campaign still grows, with a single goal: Ensuring that the new standard is applied, and that every Kenyan has equal access to citizenship.
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