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RSC wins major new funding from IKEA Foundation for research on refugee economies

We are delighted to announce that the Refugee Studies Centre (RSC) has finalised a new three-year funding agreement with the IKEA Foundation.

This agreement, totalling £1.3 million, will cover funding in three areas: a three-year Research Fellow at Lady Margaret Hall integrated into activities at the RSC; research at the RSC on the economic lives and contributions of refugees in three countries; and RSC Summer School bursaries for participants from the global South.

The IKEA Foundation Research Fellowship supports an early-career researcher to undertake research of importance to the Foundation, with a focus on refugees.

The new Research Fellow has now been appointed, to be based at Lady Margaret Hall and the Refugee Studies Centre for the next three years. Dr Kathrin Bachleitner, a political scientist who has worked previously in the Middle East with Palestinian refugees, intends to embark on research into how historical memory has shaped European states’ policies towards Syrian refugees.

The funding agreement will support the RSC’s Refugee Economies research in Uganda, Kenya and Ethiopia, the insights from which will be used to inform humanitarian policy and practice to benefit refugees in the long term. This project follows on from research previously undertaken by the RSC into refugee economies in Uganda and Kenya. The main focus of the research is to build an unprecedented panel data set on the economic lives and impact of refugees and hosts in these three countries across a three-year period.

The bursaries for the RSC’s International Summer School in Forced Migration will facilitate the participation of greater numbers of low-income participants from the global South, and will thus build capacity within the humanitarian sector.

Outgoing RSC Director, Professor Alexander Betts, who leads the Refugee Economies Programme, said: “This is an extremely exciting collaboration for the RSC, enabling us to scale up our work on the economic lives and impact of refugees while building our capacity for research, teaching and impact'.

Annemieke Tsike-Sossah de Jong, Head of Portfolio, Reshaping Humanitarian Response, said: The IKEA Foundation believes innovative research can help develop practical solutions to real-world problems, and that is why we are funding the Refugee Studies Centre and the IKEA Foundation Research Fellowship’.

Find out more about the IKEA Foundation.