Claire Mcloughlin
University of Birmingham
12 June 2017
1. Overview
This report summarises recent evidence on what works in supporting refugee livelihoods in protracted crises. Particular attention is given to the work of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) in developing livelihoods for Palestinian refugees living inside and outside camps in the MENA region1 . Refugee livelihoods programming is understood here as activities that promote wage employment or self-employment through skills and vocational training, microfinance, business development and job placement (Feinstein International Center, 2012).
Much of the literature in this area acknowledges the widespread constraints to livelihoods development in refugee settings. These include a disabling policy environment, low levels of social capital, poverty, and weak baseline levels of training and skills (See: Crawford, Cosgrave,
Haysom, & Walicki, 2015; Jacobsen & Fratzke, 2016; Rohwerder, 2016). Measures to support self-sufficiency in situations of protracted population are often severely hampered by restricted freedom of movement, weak tailoring of interventions to local economic conditions, and the shortterm or the small scale nature of some programmes (Mcloughlin, 2013). The political context for supporting refugee livelihoods can also be hostile and prohibitive: host governments can be resistant to any form of livelihoods programming that promotes the ability of refugees to work and therefore compete with locals (Jacobsen & Fratzke, 2016).
While these constraints to livelihoods development are well documented, there is little available evidence of what works in addressing them. The evidence base is weak both in terms of its size and quality. Previous reviews have concluded there is both a lack of ‘hard evidence and preponderance of very small-scale interventions’ in this area (Crawford et al., 2015, p. 31). A widely-cited review in 2016 observed that very few independent impact evaluations have been carried out (Jacobsen & Fratzke, 2016, p. 11). Much of the data available in the public domain is limited to describing static outputs from livelihoods programmes in refugee settings – for example, number of target beneficiaries, or descriptive statistics of service uptake - with comparatively little consideration of longer-term outcomes on livelihoods, or wider collective impacts (ibid). In addition to these limitations, experts point out that since each protracted crisis offers its own challenges and constraints, it is probably not advisable to draw comparisons about what works across contexts (Crawford et al., 2015; Jacobsen & Fratzke, 2016). In view of these limitations, improving learning and practice regarding successful approaches to livelihoods development has recently been adopted as a key pillar of UNHCR’s Global Strategy for Livelihoods, 2014-2018 (UNHCR, 2014).
The evidence base is weak both generally and with respect to UNWRAs activities in particular. In 2017, the UN Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS) conducted an evaluation of UNWRA’s relevance, effectiveness and efficiency in promoting a decent standard of living for Palestine refugees 2010-2015 (UNESC, 2017). The mixed-method design included a meta-review of 42 evaluation reports, household and intercept surveys of a sample of refugees, field missions to Gaza, Jordan, Lebanon and the West Bank, and interviews with UNWRA staff. The evaluation concluded that overall ‘although UNRWA has made gains in its monitoring and evaluation function, these functions are still underemphasized as tools to help UNRWA learn and improve’ (UNESC, 2017, p. 2). The evaluation also concluded that UNWRA had been unsuccessful in promoting the shared goal of a decent standard of living within the agency (ibid). A combination of a precarious operating environment, restricted data availability and sub-optimal evaluation designs have all hampered the evidence base on UNWRA’s impact on supporting Palestinian refugee livelihoods (ibid).
In light of these limitations, this report is also limited. It identifies only a handful of relevant evaluations of livelihoods interventions in protracted crises. While it is not possible based on this evidence to give any reliable account of ‘what works’, these evaluations do provide some indication that certain activities have seen positive results. In general, more holistic approaches that address structural barriers (e.g. integrating measures to secure housing or address land rights) while also promoting livelihoods and skills are advocated across the literature. At the same time, short-term, ad-hoc interventions (e.g. temporary employment opportunities) have been relatively discredited as having little durable impact.
Since there is considerable guidance-style literature available (in contrast to actual evaluations), this report begins with a brief synthesis of what is considered emerging good practice for working on refugee livelihoods in protracted crises. It then presents the limited evidence of the outcomes and impacts of UNWRA’s and other agencies livelihoods programmes under three broad headings: Employability, Technical, Vocational and Educational Training (TVET) and Microfinance.