Source: UNHCR statistics
Another oft-neglected fact is that most refugees do not live
in camps. UNHCR estimate that globally, less than a 1/3 of refugees reside in
camps – the rest live almost exclusively in cities and peri-urban areas. Many
refugees relocate to the capital: for example, in Lebanon, over 25% of refugees
reside in Beirut.
Source: UNHCR
Syria Regional Response data
Refugee Access to Education
Education delivered in refugee camps is imperfect.
Curriculums are often not aligned with the system in their home country; the
language of instruction is often foreign; teaching materials are scarce, and
teachers are in dangerously short supply. This final point is particularly
vexing: many refugees are qualified teachers but are barred from formal
employment, leading to the surreal situation where there are both not enough
teachers and teachers without jobs.
Despite these issues, most refugee children in camps have
access to education. This is largely due to the logistical convenience that
refugee camps provide: by concentrating refugees in one place, host governments
and aid agencies can quickly build tents, distribute food, deliver inoculations
and set up rudimentary schools.
By contrast, the average urban refugee is less likely to be
in school. Two years ago, I volunteered for Xavier Project, an NGO focused on
increasing urban refugee access to education in East Africa. We estimated that
in Nairobi, 65% of primary school-aged and just 33% of secondary school-aged
children were attending school – making refugee children five times more likely
to be out of school than their non-refugee peers. There is significant
variation amongst country of origin: in Kampala, we estimated that just 26% of
school-age Congolese refugee children were attending school.
There are several reasons for this. Most obviously, refugees
from Somalia and DRC often cannot speak English – the primary mode of
instruction in both countries – creating a Catch 22 whereby they can’t attend
school because they can’t speak English, but they can’t learn English because
they can’t attend school. Refugees also face a minefield of bureaucratic
obstacles: many can’t enrol in school because they lack identity cards; many
more can’t enrol as they lack previous academic transcripts, which in many
cases were left behind in a rush to flee violence.
It is not just a lack of education that urban refugees must
contend with. They must also tolerate slum dwellings, frequent xenophobia and
similarly hard-to-access healthcare facilities. In many cases, it is often only
through remarkable social networks that refugees manage to survive.
Faced with this situation, a reasonable question to ask is:
why do refugees migrate to the city in the first place? I think I can answer
this question, but to do so requires a brief detour to one of the most famous
models in Development Economics: the Harris-Todaro model of rural-urban migration.
The Harris-Todaro Model
The puzzle that Harris and Todaro sought to address was
this: why do so many people migrate from rural to urban areas in the face of
high urban unemployment and poverty? Their answer: calculated risk. In
agriculture, workers are assumed to be all-but-guaranteed low-income/subsistence
work as a farmer. In the city, there is a high probability they will end up
unemployed, living in a slum and forced to eke out a living in the informal
sector. But there is also a chance they will land a formal job – with all the
salary and non-salary perks that this implies. People migrate until the
low-risk, low-reward prospect of agriculture equates with the high-risk,
high-reward returns offered in the city.
A numerical example may help illustrate this. In the table
below, people are guaranteed an income of 50 in the countryside. If they
migrate to the city, there is a 50% chance they will be unemployed (earning an
income of 20 in the informal sector) and a 50% chance they land a formal job,
which pays 80.
Assuming agents are not risk averse, they should be indifferent between remaining in the countryside and migrating to the city. Subsequently, anything that increases their likelihood of landing a formal job – or increases the salary these jobs command – should incentivise greater rural-urban migration.
Gambling for Redemption
While this model was originally devised to explain
rural-urban migration, I think it does a good job explaining camp-urban
migration decisions too. For a refugee, the low-risk, low-reward outcome is
often remaining in the camp: while they are least virtually guaranteed basic
housing, healthcare and education, they are nonetheless prohibited from formal
employment, or registering a business. The risks of migrating to the city are
extensive and have been described above. But the potential rewards are also
great. There is a possibility, however small, that they will obtain formal
employment. There is also a chance they will get sponsored by an NGO like
Xavier Project, which tend to be disproportionately located in cities. Finally,
through being near UNHCR headquarters, they may be better able to ‘play the
system’ and make their case heard, maximising their chances of being resettled
in a developed country. Hence, camp-urban migration can be considered a similar
gamble to rural-urban migration – though one with arguably higher risks and
rewards.
This simple model can be applied to risk taking in more
extreme scenarios. Consider refugees taking rubber dinghies across the
Mediterranean to Europe. This is an extremely high-risk strategy; but one that
must be compared to the often-dire alternative of staying put. When framed this
way, such a decision seems undeniably risky but
not irrational. Rather, the decision simply reflects the brutal reality
that refugees must confront.
[974 words]
References
This blog post was largely inspired by my time volunteering
for Xavier Project, an NGO based in Kenya and Uganda. They do great work:
sponsoring refugee children through school, teaching English to those without
and running adult education hubs to teach vocational skills. Please check them
out here: http://xavierproject.org/
- Harris, J. & Todaro, M. (1970), ‘Migration, Unemployment and Development: A Two-Sector Analysis’
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