“I was forced to go back to class three and I came home when I was already in class six, almost joining secondary school.”
Gerrard Aoci arrived in Kakuma refugee camp from the Democratic Republic of Congo in April 2011. He spoke French, Kiswahili, Lingala and his mother tongue, Kibembe. He didn't speak English, so the school put him back three years.
“So imagine you are about to join secondary school and when you come here, you start class three because you don't know English.”
He performs now as Lastic Sound, runs his own label and directs a community organisation in the camp. He describes himself as “a refugee artist, originally from Congo DRC, who has called Kakuma home for almost 13 years.” We spoke on a Sunday, which he typically keeps for himself.
One friend, and a bargain
The first years were lonely. “You have no friends, obviously. Your only friends are your family and you cannot stay with your family. You have to go to school. So you just feel like you're alone.”
What changed it was one boy. At Shambe primary he met Lual, from South Sudan, who spoke Kiswahili. “So with Lual, it was now simple for me to communicate, and he made me understand some basic stuff in class, some subjects and we kept on studying together and I started performing well. Actually, I was position one.”
Top of the class brought friends, the leadership of the school's Peace Club, and an inter-school competition where he won the music award. “After winning I was like, so music is my stuff now.” Back at school, he was introduced to everyone. “Now I became the pride of the school.”
At home, the music worried people. “They felt like I was not going to concentrate on school. So they started denying me the right to go for practice.” He won again at a new school, then a rap battle in the camp with a cash prize and a speaker. He brought the speaker home.
“When I brought it home, that was like a sign. My brother now believed. 'Okay, so we are going to give you a chance to do music, but promise us that you're going to perform in school.' So performing in school was my ticket to keep on doing music.”
He kept the bargain. In 2015 he won Kakuma Got Talent, and a cash prize. Shows in the camp followed, then UN events, then a slot before a TEDx event in Kakuma. “So a lot of stuff kept on coming and then from there, music became the career and source of living.”
Yet he remains clear about what it did before it paid. “With music, singing, it became my therapy.”
Your education is an emergency
The school that had put him back three years taught him something else, years later, in secondary. He asked his Kiswahili teacher why their labs looked the way they did.
“And he told me, your education is an emergency.”
He hasn't forgotten it, because of what it assumed. “The camp is a place where you people are not coming to stay forever; you will go. So there can't be a permanent education system for you because this is emergency education.” Kakuma opened in 1992. “Up to now it's more than 20 years. There are people who were born here, nursery here, primary here, secondary here, everything here. And you're still calling that one emergency education. It doesn't make sense to me.”
He describes himself as among the strongest students in every school he attended, and he watched what the national examinations did to the rest. “Like in Kakuma refugee camp, failing the national exam is something normal.” What troubles him most is the response that arrived once the failure was accepted.
“Because you see all the donations right now going to youth to get digital skills, to work remotely. Yes, but a remote job is not for everyone. Not everyone wants to be a digital marketer, not everyone wants to do web and graphic design.”
He isn't against the skills. He's against offering one exit to everyone, and he's through through the arithmetic on that as well: thousands of camp graduates with a three- or six-month course, competing with Kenyan university graduates for the same remote work. Meanwhile, he says, “there's still these young ones who are in primary school, they are dreaming of becoming pilots, they are dreaming of becoming doctors.”
The paperwork that wasn't there
His own career had a structural problem of its own, and it took a Sanara training to name it.
For years he'd worked with a team that felt like family. “I thought it was just like general work or a common job whereby everyone is bringing this, I bring this, we keep on going.” Then the sessions on law and intellectual property.
“At Sanara, we learned something called the law, legal IP. And I never knew that these were supposed to be my rights as an artist, when you are working with a management, that they're supposed to do this and that for you.”
The test came quickly. His YouTube channel was hacked, and the response from the people around him was weaker than he'd expected. “There was no clear paperwork on how we were working.” He went through it with his law coach, and ended the arrangement formally. “And that's when Lastic Records was officially born.”
He refuses to tell it as a story about bad people. “It was not in a bad way.” The problem was the warmth itself.
“It was more of a family work, not like an official agreement... I just felt like working as a family brought in some laziness… I'm thankful to the year we worked together, but at some point, I decided that I need to work me as me.”
Educate, entertain, advocate
He wants outsiders to stop seeing a category.
“When people outside of Kakuma, when you hear the word refugees, you just think it's someone in a tent, someone who has just fled war, but you forget that it's also someone who has dreams.”
He gives his purpose in the same three words whenever he's asked, and the third is the one he defends. “I want to use music to educate. Teach young ones who are coming up what's right, what's wrong, but also to advocate for what we think; people are not talking about us.”
He mentions the policy unfolding around it himself. In March 2025 the government announced the Shirika Plan, which is turning Kakuma and Dadaab from camps into municipalities, with schools and services moving to county government. Critics have said refugees weren't properly consulted. Gerrard puts it in terms of who sits at the table where such policies are discussed.
“You just hear something is coming. You guys were never represented and you are the ones facing the outcome.”
He has a song out, titled “Refugee Wishes”. The song, he says, “speaks out about what we think we deserve, who we are, and how we should be considered as refugees. Not just as refugees; refugee is just a title, and it doesn't change anything about me having my goals, what I want to achieve, or who I am as a human being.”
The album behind it has twelve songs, made with collaborators in Kakuma, Nairobi and the United States. It's called Asante. “I decided to call it Asante as thanking the community, which is Kakuma refugee camp for kind of giving me that space and the trust. And also Asante to myself as Gerard: regardless of all the challenges I've gone through, I never gave up on myself.”
What the camp needs next
He gives Sanara real credit, and then a brief. “Without Sanara, I think the thinking capacity of me and so many youth in Kakuma would still be limited to this local level, local standard.” He'd been at the programme's first graduation in the camp, and wanted us to know how colourful it was. “So you've seen we have the entire industry here in Kakuma. The only problem is supporting it and proving people like craft is paying, craft is life.”
The brief is about what comes after training.
“My recommendation to them is now to open outside platforms. You've come, you've seen there's talent. Now we need outside platforms, we need connection now outside. We need festivals.”
Sanara reports that it has already done this for one part of the camp's economy. Under its Ota Pepea market-access initiative, refugee creatives from Turkana showed their products in Nairobi and found new buyers there, according to figures the programme released in July 2026. What Gerrard describes for music is the same route, still missing: stages, a studio good enough that the Nairobi producers he's spoken to would come and record young artists in Kakuma, and audiences outside the camp. He points out that the programme is due to be there until 2027, which in his view is long enough to prove the case.
His week
The discipline is visible in how he divides his time.
“Monday to Thursday are the days for the organisation. And then we have Friday and Saturday, that's basically for music because most of the shows happen on weekend. And then Sunday is now the day of reflection.” Four days as a social worker, two as Lastic Sound, one for accounts: “What did I achieve? What were the challenges? What did we learn and how to move forward?”
He knows what people assume about artists, and he's built the week partly as an answer. “People believe you're someone who's not faithful, someone who maybe loves drugs, you know?” Parents, he says, keep children out of music for exactly that reason.
None of it feels like work to him. “I can spend the whole night recording, writing lyrics and it's normal to me. Why? Because I do something that I love.”
And for a young person who isn't sure whether to follow a creative path?
“Talent is a call. Talent is a call and if talent is a call, you just need to pick the call.”
Story: Recentred Africa. Sanara is a Mastercard Foundation programme delivered in partnership with HEVA Fund, SNDBX-Ubuntu, Baraza Media Lab and GoDown Arts Centre.