Vulnerability Is Not an Identity

We have become so focused on identifying vulnerable groups that we have forgotten something important.

Vulnerability is not an identity.

It is a condition that people move into and out of throughout their lives.

That sentence has been sitting with me for weeks because it has made me question how we think about opportunity in Kenya.

Listen closely to the language we use.

Youth empowerment.

Women empowerment.

People living with HIV.

Rural communities.

Low-income households.

Persons living with disabilities.

Every programme, every scholarship, every grant, every initiative begins by identifying a group.

At first glance, this seems perfectly reasonable. Resources are finite. Governments, NGOs and private organisations cannot help everyone, so they must decide who qualifies.

The question I keep coming back to is this:

What happens to everyone who falls between the categories?

Not because they are privileged.

But because life refuses to fit neatly into our definitions.

Take school fees.

A family may comfortably pay fees for years.

Then one parent loses their job.

A business fails.

Someone falls ill.

A marriage ends.

Suddenly, a family that never imagined applying for financial assistance is wondering how to keep a child in school.

Nothing about that family's identity changed.

Their circumstances did.

Or consider employment.

Someone earns just enough to disqualify them from most forms of assistance, yet far too little to build savings, own a home, afford quality healthcare or absorb an emergency.

On paper, they are not vulnerable.

In reality, one unexpected expense could unravel everything.

Where exactly do they fit?

We rarely ask that question.

Instead, we speak as though vulnerability belongs to certain people rather than certain seasons of life.

The problem with that thinking is that life is rarely static.

The graduate who could not find work eventually builds a successful career.

The executive is retrenched at forty-eight.

The entrepreneur thrives for ten years before the economy changes.

The healthy person develops a chronic illness.

The person receiving assistance today may be the one funding scholarships tomorrow.

Life moves.

Our categories often don't.

Perhaps this is why so many people feel invisible.

Not because they don't struggle.

But because their struggle doesn't fit the language of our programmes.

If you are thirty-eight and changing careers, where do you belong?

If you are fifty and want to return to university, who is investing in you?

If you have spent years caring for a sick parent and now want to rebuild your life, which box do you tick?

If your income is enough to exclude you from assistance but not enough to create stability, who sees you?

These are not unusual stories.

They are ordinary lives.

Yet our systems often treat them as exceptions.

I also wonder whether our obsession with categories has quietly shaped our imagination.

We speak of "the youth" as though possibility belongs primarily to them.

We celebrate young entrepreneurs, young innovators and young leaders.

All worthy.

But what message does that send to the forty-five-year-old starting over?

Or the sixty-year-old learning a new skill?

Or the widow rebuilding her finances?

Or the father retraining after an industry disappears?

When did possibility become something that expires?

I am not arguing that youth programmes should disappear.

Far from it.

Young people deserve opportunities.

So do people living with disabilities.

So do underserved rural communities.

Targeted support has an important place.

But perhaps we have become so focused on categories that we have forgotten the human being standing in front of us.

The person is always more complicated than the category.

Maybe we should spend less time asking, "Who belongs to this group?"

And more time asking, "What does this person need right now?"

Because vulnerability is not a permanent address.

It is a season.

And the uncomfortable truth is that almost all of us will pass through it at one point or another.

Some of us already have.

Some of us are there now.

Some of us simply haven't arrived yet.

If that is true, then perhaps the question is not whether we should help vulnerable people.

It is whether we have been looking for vulnerability in the wrong places all along.