Refugees: beyond a humanitarian crisis

* Any views expressed in this opinion piece are those of the author and not of Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Due in large part to armed conflicts, nearly 60 million people in 2014 were living in a state of displacement. Environmental refugees make up another 25 to 30 million; their numbers are expected to swell to 200 million by mid-century, mostly due to climate change.

Although the recent crisis in Europe has dominated headlines, 86% of the world’s refugees are hosted by developing countries that lack the capacity or financial resources to cope with the influx. The international community is running short on effective solutions – current approaches focus on short-term responses, but long-term, comprehensive actions are needed to build the resilience of refugee and host communities.

Major refugee camps are here to stay; it is time to treat them that way. Refugees can expect, on average, to remain in a camp for 17 years. The largest refugee complex in the world, in Dadaab, Kenya, hosts nearly half a million people and ranks as Kenya’s third largest city. The Zaatari camp in Jordan has grown to accommodate 160,000 Syrians, with 6,000 daily new arrivals, and is now Jordan’s fifth largest city.

Refugee camps employ outdated approaches designed for the short-term provision of humanitarian relief, yet camps like Dadaab have existed for over 25 years. Overcrowding, inadequate access to water, and poor sanitation systems increase the risk of outbreaks of deadly diseases. Most refugees live in temporary, poorly-built houses vulnerable to water, earthquakes, fire, and extreme weather. Refugees are also often forbidden to work outside the camp, leading to stagnating economic activity within the camp and limited access to crucial resources, services, and opportunities beyond those provided through humanitarian aid.

A Call to Action

Working with the Rockefeller Foundation, Dalberg recently made a comprehensive study of the difficulties that refugees, refugee camps, and host and origin communities face. We have highlighted several potential solutions to these complex challenges:

• 1. Use a human-centered design (HCD) approach to make camps more “livable” for refugees. HCD principles shift the focus from emergency products, procedures, and solutions to product usability and user-friendliness. For instance, a new food voucher program piloted in Kilis camp in Turkey provides refugees with debit cards that can be used to shop at camp grocery stores. This gives refugees more control over their purchasing power and increases competition among grocery stores, keeping prices low.
• 2. Invest in off-grid energy and water infrastructure. Approximately 90% of the families living in camps do not have access to electricity. Aid organizations could save millions of dollars—and reduce carbon emissions—if solar power and other clean energy sources were installed in camps. The common practice of trucking drinking water into camps is economically (and environmentally) unsustainable; in Jordan, MercyCorps is pursuing an alternative approach by redesigning pumps so they use less energy, drilling wells, and building pump stations or reservoirs that serve both refugee camps and the host community.
• 3. Ensure greater security and personal safety in refugee camps. Many refugee situations are characterized by an increased risk of violence, particularly against women and girls. Personal safety is not only a basic right, but is also essential to ensuring that aid agencies are able to deliver assistance. However, camps remain as cities without law. Camp managers and host countries’ security forces should  create measures to improve data collection on crimes, train humanitarian staff on resolving issues of violence, empower refugee groups to safely and accurately report and tackle crimes, and implement stricter accountability mechanisms for perpetrators of violence.
• 4. Support localization of the food supply chain. Camps almost entirely depend on traditional aid for food provision, with high distribution costs. For instance, while tight budgets have forced humanitarian agencies to cut food rations by almost a third in Kenyan camps, food distribution costs total $9.6 million per month. New developments in food production such as multi-story gardens and hydroponics could decrease dependence on external aid and take advantage of the spare human and environmental resources in and around camps.
• 5. Integrate with the local economy. Integrating refugees into the local economy reduces dependence on aid, mitigates idleness and depression, and gives local businesses the opportunity to tap into human capital that would otherwise go to waste. Free economic zones in or near refugee camps can provide livelihoods to both refugees and local populations. For instance, the Gaziantep Free Economic Zone in Turkey offers the large number of Syrian business leaders displaced by the conflict a chance to restart in new facilities. Other livelihood innovations include Refugee Open Ware (ROW), which has opened a fabrication lab in Zaatari camp staffed by refugees, Jordanian workers, and international experts working to build feasible ICT solutions for the camp.
• 6. Improve Internet and telecommunications infrastructure. Access to information enables not only a higher standard of living, but also creates opportunities for refugees to build more productive livelihoods. Potential solutions include leveraging Facebook’s, Inmarsat’s, or Google’s efforts to increase Internet access in remote areas, or exploring partnerships with local telecommunication companies.

Humanitarian and development organizations and national and municipal governments need to join in designing more comprehensive, long-term approaches that build resilience for refugees, camps, and host and origin communities. Bridging political interests and mandates as well as financial needs and capacity requirements among various stakeholders will be a difficult but critical task. The changing nature of the refugee crises requires a paradigm shift in the way we respond to it.