New Blog Post: Naohiko Omata and Josiah Kaplan on Refugee Livelihoods
In the latest post to ODID's blog, Debating Development, Naohiko Omata and Josiah Kaplan of the Humanitarian Innovation Project have written about refugee engagement with host economies.
Contrary to popular perception, refugees’ economic lives by no means exist in a ‘vacuum’, shut off from the wider economic structures of their host country. Indeed, no refugee camp, regardless of how remote its location, is ever fully closed to traffic in goods, capital and people from outside.
In urban settings, self-settled refugees are tied to the larger host economy even more directly. While existing studies have identified broad connections between refugees and external economies, little is known in detail about how, and in what ways, refugees are linked with local, district or regional economic actors in a refugee-receiving state.
To fill in this analytical gap, the Humanitarian Innovation Project has, over the last year, conducted fieldwork in Uganda across three sites: Kampala, Nakivale and Kyangwali refugee settlements.