Uganda’s refugee policies have been widely recognized as among the most progressive in the world. Its ‘self-reliance model’ permits refugees to work and choose their place of residence, allocates plots of land for refugees to cultivate, and encourages integrated...
JDC Literature Review
Results for: Integration, Inclusion and Social Cohesion
Economic Impact of Giving Land to Refugees
The authors examine the impact of giving refugees access to cultivable land on refugee and host community welfare in Uganda. Cultivable land is allotted randomly to refugees when they arrive in refugee settlements, provided idle land is available at the time of their arrival. On average, refugee households received a plot roughly 0.5 hectares in size.
Integrating Refugee Doctors into Host Health-care Systems
This article identifies a number of obstacles faced by refugee doctors wishing to practice medicine in host countries, despite the significant contribution they can make in areas with doctor shortages and/or large immigrant or refugee populations. The authors describe...
From Refugee to Employee: Work Integration in Rural Denmark
This article describes Red Cross Denmark’s Fast Track program, which aims to facilitate early access to the local labor market for refugees while they are still in the asylum phase. It allows participants to remain in the municipality where they claim asylum rather...
Are Asylum Seekers More Likely to Work with More Inclusive Labor Market Access Regulations?
This paper evaluates whether inclusive labor market policies increase the labor market participation of asylum seekers, by exploiting the variation in asylum policies in Swiss cantons to which asylum seekers are randomly allocated. During the period from 2011 to 2014,...
The Gig Economy in Complex Refugee Situations
This article explores the challenges and opportunities presented by the gig economy for Syrian refugees in Jordan. Research with Syrian female refugees in Jordan suggests that, despite significant challenges, the gig economy (where workers and purchasers of their...
Refugee Livelihoods: New Actors, New Models
This article explores the potential contributions of governments, development actors, the private sector, and humanitarian actors to support refugee livelihoods. The authors begin by making the case for the early economic inclusion of refugees in order not to prevent...
Validating Highly Educated Refugees’ Qualifications
This article highlights initiatives in Sweden and Norway to streamline procedures for validating refugees’ qualifications. There are lengthy processes for validating foreign qualifications in Norway, Sweden and Germany, which prevent some highly educated refugees from...
Expanding Economic Opportunities in Protracted Displacement
The ‘Supporting Syria and the Region’ conference in London in 2016 set an ambitious target to create up to 1.1 million new jobs for refugees and host communities by 2018—but there was no clarity around how, where, and for whom these jobs would be created. A 2016 joint...
Syrian Refugee Entrepreneurship in Turkey – Integration and the Use of Immigrant Capital in the Informal Economy
This article examines small-scale entrepreneurship of Syrian refugees in three Turkish cities: Istanbul, Gaziantep, and Hatay. The author uses ‘forms of capital’ as an analytical frame, encompassing: (a) economic capital; (b) social capital; (c) cultural capital...