By: Simar Singh, Solenne Delga, Alli Gillespie
Claudine, a client in RefugePoint’s Urban Refugee Protection Program, sells vegetables and snacks at a market in Nairobi, Kenya. Photo by Alexis Felder.
In the face of the increasing scale and length of forced displacement, enhancing self-reliance for refugees has become a prominent objective in humanitarian response. At the Global Refugee Forum last December, governments, funders, civil society, researchers and private sector actors made over 250 pledges to advance this goal; and yet, the evidence on what it takes to help refugees become and remain self-reliant has been lagging behind. Without knowing what works best where and for whom in self-reliance programming, it is difficult to set feasible targets and know which program approaches to invest in and scale up in different contexts. In a step towards building the evidence base, RefugePoint and the Danish Refugee Council (DRC) collaborated to produce a knowledge-mapping and assessment of available research and evidence relating to self-reliance for refugees. As members of the Refugee Self-Reliance Initiative, this project builds on previous efforts undertaken by the Initiative and contributes to its Learning Agenda.
We had three main objectives for this project:
To consolidate and map publicly available knowledge and evidence on refugee self-reliance so that practitioners and policymakers can access and understand the available evidence base;
To identify program approaches that have proven to be effective in advancing self-reliance so that these can be further replicated and scaled;
To identify what we don’t yet know so that researchers and the wider community of practice can prioritize filling these evidence gaps.
The main outputs of this project include a “living” resource library of over 160+ resources on refugee self-reliance, as well as a series of thematic evidence briefs:
Reflections on the state of the evidence
For this project, we reviewed 160 publicly accessible documents that were published between 2005 and early 2021. In doing so, we examined:
Whose voices dominate the self-reliance debate and which populations the research has overlooked (the ‘who’);
Which geographies and contexts are studied and which are missing from the research on self-reliance (the ‘where’);
What works to facilitate self-reliance (the ‘how’) and;
How to assess the ‘value for money’ of self-reliance programming (the ‘how much’).
Through our review, we found that the evidence base reflects the concentration of a small number of perspectives and displacement contexts. The vast majority (around 90%) of the resources reviewed were published by only 15 organizations, most of which are based in Europe and North America. Moreover, our review found few resources that center refugee voices when discussing what self-reliance looks like and how it should be measured. Fewer than 25% of the resources reviewed included refugee voices and perspectives, beyond including survey data. We also found that existing evidence is overwhelmingly focused on refugee-hosting countries in East Africa, and the Middle East. Outside of these contexts, evidence on self-reliance remains relatively sparse.
While agencies have been conducting self-reliance programming for many years, systematic efforts to rigorously measure the impact of these interventions are few and far between. Most evidence reviewed for this project came from grey literature including programmatic reports published by implementing agencies (50%) and policy papers (~15%), followed by research papers and studies (~35%). The results were most often presented in case studies drawing on program evaluation and survey data. We found relatively few impact evaluations that included methods such as randomized control trials (RCTs).
It’s also important to note that not all relevant data on refugee self-reliance is readily accessible. We identified and reviewed 160 relevant documents that were available in the public domain. However, from key informant interviews and our own experience implementing refugee self-reliance programs, we know that there is rich program and evaluation data that is shared within agencies and consortia, but not made available publicly. This accessibility gap limits sector-wide knowledge-sharing and learning and compounds the evidence gap.
What we know and what we don’t
Defining Self-Reliance
How we choose to talk about self-reliance matters; it shapes the expectations, objectives, and approaches of all stakeholders in the refugee response system, including practitioners, policymakers, researchers, funders, governments, and displaced populations themselves. While self-reliance has steadily grown in prominence as an objective in refugee response, we find that there is not yet a shared understanding of the concept, as evidenced by the range of different definitions in use. We found that while self-reliance is increasingly understood as a multidimensional concept, a significant proportion of the literature still focuses exclusively on the economic dimension of self-reliance.
Self-Reliance Programming
Achieving self-reliance doesn’t look the same across all contexts or for all populations. Consequently, there is no one-size-fits-all approach to self-reliance programming. The literature reviewed emphasizes that contextualized and tailored designs are paramount to quality programming. Yet, there is relatively little research about self-reliance programming that is specifically segmented by differences in context and population. In addition, most of the existing literature focuses on documenting barriers and opportunities, rather than good programming practices. This makes it challenging to draw conclusions about whether effective program models can be applied to contexts that share similar characteristics or populations with specific needs. Nevertheless, the literature does identify several key considerations by context and population group that practitioners can use to inform self-reliance program design.
Self-reliance programs typically include economic and/or social inclusion interventions. Legal inclusion is increasingly acknowledged as an enabler of refugee self-reliance. Implementing agencies use different combinations of these components when designing self-reliance programs. While the literature primarily discusses program components (e.g. livelihoods interventions, social network development, etc.) in isolation, it also suggests that only focusing on interventions in a single sector will likely be insufficient to support most refugees to become self-reliant. This does not necessarily suggest though that every agency undertaking self-reliance programming must shift towards holistic program models. Instead, it encourages working in a coordinated manner across sectors to ensure that refugees receive support that is tailored to their needs and can lead to improved self-reliance.
Livelihood interventions are widely considered to be a central and necessary component of economic inclusion programming in support of refugee self-reliance. However, not all livelihood interventions for refugees are necessarily conducive to self-reliance. Rather, interventions that are market-based and aim at providing decent, sustainable and diversified livelihoods are considered more effective in supporting self-reliance. Emerging in the literature is also the importance of providing consumption support and promoting financial inclusion, alongside livelihoods support.
There is increasing recognition that the level of self-reliance that refugees can achieve in a given context is highly dependent on the policy environment and the macroeconomic environment. However, we did not find much research comparing self-reliance of refugees with that of the local host community, which can shed light on how the policy and economic context of the local area impact the potential for any resident - be they a refugee or a host to become self-reliant.
Beyond individual and household-level interventions, identifying structural barriers impacting refugees and designing system-level interventions that contribute to the broader development of refugee-hosting areas are also critical elements of self-reliance programming. Advancing self-reliance therefore depends upon the engagement of multiple stakeholders in program design and implementation, including humanitarian actors, local authorities, the private sector, civil society and development actors, towards creating an environment that enables self-reliance.
Measuring Impact
Much of the literature on self-reliance only makes a passing reference to measurement, usually highlighting the need to create robust measures and acknowledging the complexity of doing so. The vast majority of self-reliance programs in the resources reviewed do not use tools or conceptual frameworks that have been specifically developed to measure or evaluate refugee self-reliance. Instead, most used project-specific indicators that were selected as proxies for self-reliance, such as levels of income, number of job placements, or access to basic services. While these measure the results of individual program interventions, they provide an incomplete picture of the self-reliance standing of a refugee, which is dependent on numerous interdependent factors, and ultimately fail to shed light on effective programming approaches that promote self-reliance. However, in the last few years there have been some promising attempts to bridge this measurement gap, notably through the Self-Reliance Index, developed by the Refugee Self-reliance Initiative and through research undertaken by the Refugee Economies program at the University of Oxford.
We also found that self-reliance is typically measured in line with 12 month humanitarian program cycles, usually at the baseline and/or endline. However, these short program cycles are not well aligned with the longer timeframes that are typically needed to observe changes in self-reliance outcomes. In addition, since self-reliance is understood as transitioning off dependence on aid, it is important to measure the self-reliance status of a household extending past the end of a project cycle to understand the sustainability of results. However, there are few systematic efforts to do so, driving a gap in the evidence.
Financing for Self-Reliance and Value-for-Money
The literature reviewed questions whether self-reliance programs can be successfully implemented within the typical short-term funding cycles of humanitarian programs and increasingly notes that traditional humanitarian funding streams are not well-suited for self-reliance programming. Most humanitarian funding is designed to support relatively short (6-12 month) program cycles and sector-specific interventions. This approach to funding is not aligned with the multi-year, multi-sector, integrated approaches to self-reliance programming that are considered to be more effective.
Several resources in the literature reviewed suggest that self-reliance programming has better value-for-money (usually conceptualized in terms of cost-efficiency) than other types of humanitarian programming for displaced populations. However, there are few critical reflections on how to calculate the value-for-money of self-reliance programming and whether cost-efficiency is an appropriate metric to do so.
Related Agendas
We did not find much research exploring connections between self-reliance and related topics such as durable solutions, climate change and localization. This stood out as a significant gap in the evidence base and signified missed opportunities to inform policies and practices on these connected agendas.
Ways Forward
We hope that the findings from the Self-Reliance Evidence Review are used to inform and guide the design, implementation, measurement and funding of programming and policy approaches to support refugee self-reliance. We also hope that it inspires researchers, practitioners and funders to support the production and sharing of research and learning that addresses the identified knowledge gaps highlighted in this review and grow the evidence base around effective programs and policies to improve self-reliance outcomes for refugees and other forcibly displaced populations. Addressing the evidence gaps highlighted in the Self-Reliance Evidence Review will contribute to a more nuanced understanding of refugee self-reliance that can be used to inform program and policy directions and guide funding investments. Increasing the diversity of perspectives contributing to the evidence base on self-reliance, with a focus on amplifying community-based perspectives and refugee voices, will impact how we understand and define self-reliance, what types of program designs are considered effective for different contexts and populations and how we perceive ‘success’ of these efforts.
