What can change for refugees in the first six months of their engagement with RefugePoint?
By Jacinta Mutie, Nicholas Mbata, Patrick Guyer
Photo: Esperance is able to meet her family’s needs with her roadside stall selling omena (small fish) and vegetables.
How much of a difference can six months make in the lives of refugees living in Nairobi?
Enough to help refugee families take critical first steps towards self-reliance by helping them afford housing, ensuring full meals on the table every day, covering school fees so kids can go to school, and easing access to needed health care for all family members. This article features analysis of data from refugee families who joined RefugePoint’s Urban Refugee Protection Program (URPP) in Nairobi, Kenya, in 2023. Fresh insights shared below show that, with the right combination of services and support, even refugees facing extreme vulnerabilities can take critical steps towards self-reliance in just the first six months of their engagement with RefugePoint’s holistic support.
RefugePoint’s Urban Refugee Protection Program
More than 105,000 refugees and asylum seekers live in Kenya’s urban areas, most in the capital city of Nairobi. Unlike refugees in camps, urban refugees are expected to meet their own basic needs. They often lack adequate legal protections and frequently struggle to access basic services, which are few and fragmented.
RefugePoint’s Urban Refugee Protection Program (URPP) prioritizes supporting these refugees using a Self-Reliance Runway Approach that provides a concrete, measurable pathway for enhancing self-reliance. Through the URPP, RefugePoint identifies refugees experiencing extreme vulnerabilities, helps them stabilize, and addresses their social protection needs. This stabilization phase provides a ‘runway’ for refugees to eventually reach the point when they are ready to engage in economic pursuits and achieve a degree of self-reliance – that is, to earn sufficient income to cover their essential needs and improve their quality of life, without depending on assistance. The URPP works intensively with a core caseload of about 1,500 refugees annually.
Our combination of services and support is refugee-centered and holistic—filling critical gaps in the patchwork of services currently available for urban refugees facing extreme vulnerabilities. Our support is personalized to each household’s needs, desires, and capabilities.
Measuring Self-Reliance
The number of refugees who stabilize and graduate from the URPP is an important part of our impact. But, it’s also critical that we look at how living conditions and capabilities change for refugee households over time and how durable these changes are, even after refugees graduate to self-reliance or otherwise leave the program. Tracking the progress of our clients towards self-reliance also allows us to adapt our support in response to the changing needs of urban refugees.
Our primary tool for measuring impact is the Self-Reliance Index (SRI), the first-ever global tool for measuring the progress of refugee households toward self-reliance. It was developed jointly by members of the Refugee Self-Reliance Initiative with leadership from RefugePoint and the Women’s Refugee Commission. The SRI was first launched in 2020 to track refugee households’ progress toward self-reliance over time and screen clients before entering the program. The SRI is now widely used in the sector and has been adopted by 64 agencies in countries around the world.
Steps towards self-reliance in the first six months
Enrollment in the URPP’s stabilization services made a positive difference for many clients in just the first six months after joining the program. Many refugees facing extreme vulnerabilities entered the program with considerable challenges, struggling to put food on the table, pay rent and their childrens’ school fees and access healthcare. Thanks in large part to the support they received, after half a year, the typical refugee household that joined the program in 2023 saw their household’s rent burden fall, ate full meals more frequently, sent their children to school more often, and had a better chance of accessing needed healthcare than when they joined the program. The figure below shows these gains across the domains of the SRI for this group of clients.
Some indicators of the sustainability of self-reliance also showed improvement. The average Debt Domain score improved, indicating that the total number of forms of debt fell somewhat for households in the program. Savings also got a boost, and scores for social capital went up as well. There was also an uptick in the employment score, possibly as a result of the business grant support that RefugePoint extends to the clients. This is important because these are not outcomes that the URPP contributes to directly: they are very positive signs that many households are moving towards self-reliance that will be sustainable over time.
Also notable is what didn’t change for households in the first six months. Housing adequacy and health status changed little, although these indicators may simply take longer to shift. Perceptions of safety actually fell slightly. This may be tied to the location where the household lives, and may also be influenced by localized safety concerns that the program cannot easily influence.
The SRI and many domain scores improved for clients in the first six months of URPP participation
Building Self-Reliance, to Graduation and Beyond
When we work with refugee households and support them with the right mix of services to help them along the Self-Reliance Runway, the results have the potential to be life-changing. With the benefit of insights like these, RefugePoint will redouble its efforts to scale the parts of our programming that work best and strengthen the parts where improvements are needed. We will also keep adapting and innovating to find new ways to work with and support urban refugees to build a firm foundation of self-reliance that will endure long after they graduate from the URPP.