Community organising gets boost after ruling on public participation

This week’s September 10 ruling ends one of the major assaults on human rights protections and freedom of association for communities across 47 counties since promulgation of the Constitution 16 years ago.

Kenya has a long history of community-led organising. While often overlooked in favour of larger, better-resourced, and more professionalised Public Benefits Organisations, the National Community Based Organisations Council estimates there are at least 57,000 community-based organisations registered in Kenya.

Rooted in local communities, most operate without formal registration. Their members come together to address shared challenges, pool resources, or advocate for services that are absent or denied in our informal settlements and rural villages. Among them are legal empowerment centres whose origins can be traced to the Law Society of Kenya’s 1970s legal advice programme in Shauri Moyo.

Registered in 2015, the Mathare Social Justice Centre is the oldest of these Social Justice Centres. MSJC has spent the past decade advancing its vision of a “Mathare free of human rights violations.”

A leading force in documenting and advocating against extrajudicial killings and enforced disappearances, it’s members have built community assets including parks, waste cooperatives, legal empowerment programmes, a theatre, a writers’ network, and a domestic workers’ cooperative in one of Kenya’s most disadvantaged urban communities.

Their landmark “Who is Next?” report documented more than 800 unlawful police killings in Mathare and other Nairobi settlements between 2013 and 2016. Repeated arrests and reprisals, including office raids as recently as June 2026 has followed their work on corruption, inequality, police accountability and the annual Saba Saba marches.

Three years ago on 15 August 2023, Mathare Sub-County Social Development Officer ordered MSJC to amend its objectives because its human rights work allegedly fell outside the Community Groups Registration Act (2022).

MSJC went to court, triggering the case that has ultimately dismantled the law for all community-led groups. This week Justice Lawrence Mugambi has ruled that the law was enacted without in-put by community groups and public participation, relying instead, on submissions from ministries, the Council of Governors and the NGO Coordination Board. Parliament has until 11 February 2027 to amend the law, or it will be struck off the statute books.

The Community Groups Registration Act (2022) created a Social Development Director with broad powers to register, investigate, renew, suspend, and dissolve community groups.

Using vague standards such as “activities deemed contrary to public policy or community welfare”, the law encroached on devolved county functions, enabled state control over civic groups by undermining their group rights to association and participatory democracy under Articles 36 and 10.

Until Thursday, this law empowered state officials to police community organising, much as colonial authorities did with independent schools in the 1950s and the KANU regime banned CLARION for its anti-corruption research and legal empowerment programming in the 1990s.

Community groups, public benefit organisations, and human rights advocates must now proactively engage Parliament to ensure any revised law removes vague, discretion-heavy provisions and firmly protects the rights to fair administration and freedom of association. Otherwise, Parliament risks re-enacting the same law with a participatory paper trail attached.

Still, this is a significant victory. Public participation cannot be reduced to consultation between state institutions. Laws must uphold, not undermine the Constitution and civic space is essential to democracy.

The Mathare Social Justice Centre and Katiba Institute counsel must be praised for securing this important win, not just for the people of Mathare but for the hundreds of thousands of communities throughout the country.

Two weeks ago, we celebrated the freedoms guaranteed for 56 million Kenyans by the Constitution. The participatory democracy we celebrated depends on the voice, agency and organising power of communities.

Without them, the Constitution cannot take root where it matters most. Furthermore, community led organisations exist because PBOs, state agencies and businesses have failed to meet people’s needs.

Granting state officials, the power to question legitimacy of groups that fill those gaps, especially those working on accountable governance and human rights protection, is both illogical and must always offend us.