Paper short abstract:

Although 60% of the world’s refugees and asylum seekers lives in cities, humanitarian policy often misses the potential of urban refugee enterprise. Drawing on research in urban Ethiopia and Kenya, this paper explores how understandings of ‘refugee economies’ challenge entrenched policy approaches.

Paper long abstract:

Africa is the fastest urbanising region of the world, with its urban population growing to 1.5 billion by 2050. In a context of rapid growth and widespread conflict, a hidden population of refugees and undocumented migrants is attracted to cities by anonymity and opportunity. About 60% of the world's 32.5 m refugees and asylum seekers live in cities, where they often join the ranks of the urban poor, and restrictive policy limiting rights to work, and their displacement experience, exacerbates their vulnerability. Humanitarian assistance, poorly adjusted to dealing with dispersed urban refugees, has focussed on the role of livelihoods in supporting refugee households, but often misses the collective impact of the sectors in which refuges work, and their potential contribution to local economies.

This paper examines how political regimes and lived realities differ in different refugee hosting contexts, in both large and secondary cities. Drawing on research with refugee populations in urban Ethiopia and Kenya, the paper develops the concept of ‘refugee economies’, the collective economy of refugee livelihoods and enterprise, to examine two themes. First, the extent to which political regulation depresses economic enterprise but is subverted by refugee enterprise to form new and complementary urban economic sectors. Second, is to explore the dynamic economic relations that link refugee and kinship economies across towns, camps and borders, to challenge the entrenched camp-urban divide in national refugee policy and humanitarian approaches.