Jennifer Kandjii
Research Officer
| Degrees: | MA (UEL), IDHA (Fordham), BSc (Namibia) |
Jennifer Kandjii is the Research Officer on the LERRN-IDRC initiative on localizing knowledge production on forced displacement. She is in the final stages of her Ph.D. in Global Governance at the Balsillie School of International Affairs at the University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Canada. Her dissertation focuses on refugee governance and experiences in South Africa, drawing links and interrogating tensions between policy and practices of policy implementation, citizenry xenophobic discrimination and violence, and refugees’ precarious existence while elucidating the struggles, resistance, and resilience strategies that refugees espouse in this context. Her research aims to draw attention to the combining impact of state and non-state actors’ citizenship agendas on refugees’ lived experiences and the varying precarity dimensions that refugees experience in South Africa. Her work strives to influence the reform of refugee governance policies and practices in this context.
Prior to her doctoral studies, she worked for seven years as a Field Associate with UNHCR in Namibia, where she managed a range of UNHCR projects. A particular focus of her work related to objectives relating to gender equality, through she led training and capacity building activities for project and partner staff, empowering of over 2000 women and girls while engaging with more than 3500 men and boys to transform patriarchal and traditional norms that produce unequal power relations.
Jennifer holds a Master of Arts (with distinction) in refugee studies from the University of East London, UK, a postgraduate International Diploma in Humanitarian Assistance (IDHA) from the Centre of International Humanitarian Cooperation and Fordham University, and a bachelor of science in Chemistry and Molecular & Physiological Biology from the University of Namibia.