 Today I'm going to be presenting some information about a research project that I have that's actually ongoing so I'll be presenting some preliminary findings but I'm still in the process of conducting the study so at some future date I would have some better findings for you. This project focuses on the potential advantages of Syrian diaspora assistance to diaspora refugees or to refugees rather. When I talk about the diaspora here I'm thinking of people who are economic migrants to places outside of Syria who maybe they or their parents migrated a generation ago and now are providing aid back to forced migrants inside Syria and in the neighboring countries nearby. My presentation does focus on advantages but I want to be very clear that I am not suggesting that diaspora aid is some sort of magic bullet that can solve all kinds of problems. We know there's a lot of things that are problematic about diasporas being involved in conflict so I just want to acknowledge from the outset that I am aware of that and I'm happy to have a conversation about that but because of the topic of this paper I'm looking specifically at potential advantages. Let's see. Alright so some of the preliminary findings that I have to present today are about some of the characteristics of these folks that are engaged in diaspora aid and this is that they have very strong motivations to be engaged in aid because of their familial ties their ancestral ties to the region. This causes them to be willing to persist even in the face of a lot of barriers to being able to provide that aid. They feel this very strong obligation to persist in providing aid. There's a lot of cultural competence and familiarity that comes with being a member of the diaspora although as I will mention there are some limitations to that as well. Also there are a lot of informal accountability mechanisms that come up in this provision of aid that are based on those social network ties that come from familial ties and friendship ties in the region. So I want to talk a little bit about what diaspora philanthropy is because I know it's not a concept everyone has heard of necessarily. Many of us are familiar with diaspora remittances. I think this audience in particular probably knows quite a bit about remittances and there is some relationship between the two so these data are a bit dated but the purpose really is to provide a sense of scope rather than precision so that this data from 2014 is we have 180 million migrants from poor countries around the world who send money home usually on a monthly basis if not more so this is a lot of money that's coming back to sending countries and we know that some portion of this money is in the form of philanthropy towards social projects although it's very difficult to get a good idea of the figure there the precise figures there if we compare this to foreign aid we see that actually remittances is has much is much larger than foreign aid if we look globally so we realize that this there's a lot of development potential in remittances if they're used appropriately and effectively this is just an example of the impact of remittances in various countries again this data is a little bit dated at this point but on average migrants send home about 200 US dollars per month to their country of origin and if we think about a place like Somalia where the income is about $250 a year is the average income then we can imagine that in some countries that's really quite an impact to have those remittances coming home so when we think about diaspora remittances and the research on remittances we have reason to believe that some of that also would apply to diaspora philanthropy which I in a moment I'll describe exactly what I mean by that we know that remittances have large impacts on local economies they tend to increase within stability and conflict this is different than other forms of aid a lot of times other forms of aid decreases when places become more unstable and there's more conflict remittances tend to go up because family members are very concerned about the people in their home country so it has sort of more of an insurance effect that when times get rough the money is going to increase the money goes directly to the poor it's not going through intermediaries and we do have pretty good research that shows that communities that receive high levels of remittances tend to have higher school attendance less school dropout higher birth weights all kinds of things that we know are really positively associated with well-being in communities now there are some challenges as well we know that the impacts of remittances and we assume also of diaspora philanthropy is unequal across communities and across individuals oftentimes folks who are able to send migrants abroad are not necessarily from the poorest or most in need communities my own country in the United States is a great example we have many many Indian migrants to Silicon Valley who are engineers and make lots of money and they send a lot of money back to India but that money is not going to the poorest of the communities because typically those folks who are able to migrate are not from the poorest Indian communities so we are not sure that there's going to be equal impacts in terms of those remittances and also these are intertwined this idea that the communities that are most able to send are not necessarily the ones that are in most need of the money and also remittances the investments are largely personal and they don't always address widespread social needs so you might be sending money home for your family members health care to help your mother repair her house something like that and whether or not it goes out into the broader community is still of question so for this project I'm looking specifically at diaspora philanthropy and so what I define this as for the purposes of this research project is money goods volunteer labor knowledge and skills other sorts of assets that are donated to a community that is broader than your family members in a country or a region where you have population with ancestral ties so the idea here would be that it's not just your family members it's going outside of that and the second thing that's key is that it's not I personally expand it beyond just country of origin because this allows us to consider for example Syrians in Great Britain who are sending money back to Turkey to help Syrian refugees in Turkey right it's not the country of origin but it's a southern country that's a host of a lot of these of these displaced people there's a lot of research on mechanisms of diaspora philanthropy today I'm specifically talking about this area in red which is foreign based ethnic NGOs so the folks that I've interviewed for this project are all members founders most of them of formal NGOs that are small Syrian diaspora NGOs so some of the presumed advantages of diaspora philanthropy that we see in the really small but growing literature on diaspora philanthropy is this idea that diaspora members may be better able to target difficult to reach locations or populations they presumably would have a better understanding of local needs and how to circumvent maybe challenges in the local system because they have that cultural familiarity with the systems in their local context there's a greater interest in persevering in spite of obstacles that might drive out other sorts of aid organizations that they would be able to identify local partners better and identify whether partners are trustworthy in a better manner than other types of organizations may be and also that they might have greater credibility with those partners so because they are from the area they speak the language they have the cultural competence those partners would see them as more credible and also there is some argument that diaspora organizations might be more willing to address problems that are controversial in the local community because of those country of residence norms so for example there's an argument that perhaps diaspora members are more willing to deal with issues of gender equality you know gay and lesbian issues other kinds of issues that might be considered controversial locally that would be maybe in the country of residence where they've migrated to would be considered more reasonable to try to address in some way there are also challenges we know that new migrants usually have really limited financial resources so being overly reliant on those migrants is a challenge there is some argument that countries of origin who are overly reliant on remittances may neglect development goals they might say oh well people are sending money home it's their job to take care of that work the state is no longer really going to address some of those needs and so that's a concern depending on why migrants left that they're the countries of origin might be very resistant to that investment especially if people left for political reasons or reasons of conflict and there's also issues that diasporas might be well meeting but not particularly professional right these are usually people that they're not professional aid workers this might not they don't maybe have training in public health or social worker education and those sorts of things so they're engaging in well meaning efforts but the question of effectiveness arises because of that training and as we know diasporas might also exacerbate conflict in some areas so my work focuses on Syrian migrants and I know we've all heard a lot about the crisis in Syria but I just wanted to remind us a little bit of how the crisis stands at the moment there are 5.1 million refugees that have fled Syria at this point we have 4.8 million of those refugees are in the global south so in spite of all of the media attention to migration to Europe the vast majority of these refugees are living in neighboring countries in the global south which includes Egypt Iraq Jordan Turkey and Lebanon Turkey hosts the largest number of refugees in terms of number in terms of proportion to the local population Lebanon hosts the greatest proportion of refugees relative to the local population and then inside Syria of course we have all kinds of problems continuing 6.3 million internally displaced people and then about 13.5 million that have been identified by the UN as being in need of humanitarian assistance even if they've been able to remain in their own communities so huge humanitarian crisis that we've all heard quite a bit about so it's important to consider the specific needs of migrants who migrate to other southern countries as opposed to wealthier northern countries so refugees who are able to migrate to European member states we have a sense that they are better off than refugees that stay in the south and by better off I do not mean to underestimate their suffering in any in any way but we know that people who stay in the global south are more likely to be less affluent they're more likely to be children or mothers of young children if you're elderly if you're ill with your if you're a person with a disability you're not going to be able to migrate all the way to Europe so the people who stay in the global south first of all we have way more refugees in the global south second they're a group that's particularly needy even in comparison to the broader refugee population and then I wanted to talk a little bit about Lebanon as a host state quite a few of my interviews are from Lebanon and I think it just provides a really interesting examination of what southern host state capacity is so in Lebanon for context it's about one 23rd the size of Ghana we're thinking about a pretty small geographic area about a third of the size of Belgium for people who maybe aren't as familiar with the geographic size of Ghana so we're talking about a relatively small country the population of Lebanon in 2012 before the conflict started was about 4.6 million now we have more than 1 million Syrian refugees in Lebanon they're actually not called refugees because Lebanon doesn't recognize formally that there is a conflict happening in Syria the Lebanese state has not legally recognized that and so they're they are visitors to Lebanon and I have here highlighted that that data is from May 2015 because that in 2015 the government of Lebanon asked the UN to stop registering new arrivals so we know that the number is actually much higher than one million but those folks have not been counted because the Lebanese government asked them to stop registering those new arrivals Syrian refugees live in more than 2,000 communities they've also built almost 1,500 informal refugee settlements in agricultural land and other places around the country 70% of these migrants in Lebanon live below the poverty line so they're very very much in need and Lebanon currently hosts the third largest number of refugees of any country so we have all these folks who have fled Syria all the people who are displaced within Syria and then thinking of Lebanon as a host state Lebanon is a country that already had very weak infrastructure even prior to the conflict they had their own civil war and ongoing sectarian conflict after the civil war that they've been recovering from some of you may have heard about the Lebanese garbage crisis in the news like really basic services are not always conducted there and so to have an additional million people there is really quite a burden well they've been wonderful hosts but it's quite a challenge for the for local organizations so for this study which is in process this is very very brief methods but I'm doing semi-structured interviews with people who are in leadership roles in Syrian diaspora nonprofits these are formally registered nonprofit organizations although they're registered in different countries they're not registered in Lebanon because the Lebanese government won't allow them to register there. I've been able to interview 26 folks who are in leadership roles by that I'm thinking of founders of the organization board members people who are sort of in a management level of directing programs and services and different initiatives. These are the people I've done formal interviews with I've been able to have conversations with upward of a hundred Syrian diasprans about their efforts there in Lebanon and all of the people that I've interviewed are either Syrian or they're of Syrian descent so these are some of the sites of where the folks live that I've been able to conduct interviews with and I already have my five minute warning so I'm going to do my findings more quickly one of the big findings of the project is that diaspora identity is a really strong motivator of philanthropy around these groups people feel a real obligation to give aid to their fellow Syrians because they have those ancestral ties and that's something that we would expect from the literature and anyone who's interested in my full paper I have a lot of great qualitative quotes that really demonstrate this and I'd be happy to share that with you but this diaspora identity is a very very strong motivator of philanthropy. This awareness that their fellow Syrians are reliant on assistance has created a real sense of obligation so even during times when other maybe not the largest aid organizations like the UN but when other mid-sized NGOs are deciding to pull out because things are becoming too difficult and too dangerous these organizations actually feel an added obligation to give more and give become more involved and this is something that we know from the literature on remittances but we did not know really about the about diaspora philanthropy. We do I do also find that there's additional cultural competence and local knowledge that helps in the work that these organizations are doing this is limited however in certain ways so what I find is that people who grew up in the region or nearby have much more cultural competence than for example people who grew up in North America or in Europe and so an example I might share is I was attending a meeting um with a lot of Canadian Syrian diaspora members and they were proposing some solutions for the schools and they said well we're going to buy everybody iPads we're going to stall apps and the students can learn um on these iPads and these apps in Lebanon in these camps and I had gone to visit these camps and so I sort of as the outsider had to remind them well there's no wi-fi in the tent camps and also there's not always electricity and there are not apps in Arabic and the students don't speak English yet and so some of these things that um someone who maybe hasn't visited the context in quite a while it's not obvious to them these these sorts of barriers that exist and so one future direction of research I'm very interested in is looking at um diasporas from different regions of the world and seeing how maybe the impressions and the understanding of local needs varies in those different regions. One of the things that I find most interesting in the project so far is the kind of accountability mechanisms that these organizations are able to develop because of their friendship and familial ties. So these organizations are doing things like carrying cash across international borders because there's no operating banking system inside of Syria they're trying to they're not allowed to open bank accounts in Lebanon they can sometimes do that in Turkey but when they're trying to move money they're having a local person go to the ATM every day and withdraw cash to maybe pay their doctors pay their teachers so there's a there are many many opportunities for for lack of accountability right for theft and embezzlement and all sorts of things but with their social network ties they're really able to identify trust trustworthy partners because of this reliance on familial networks. Someone's cousin knows the person in the village who's going to go ask everyone in the village what do you think of this person and and find out whether or not that person is a trustworthy um individual to work with and it's also very useful in terms of identifying other kinds of partners because they don't just have a humanitarian aid network they also have um they're from a variety of different professions right so if you need someone who can do cement work they have someone who knows how to do that and can come rebuild the school so there's sort of this access to a broader network than some others have and the reputation of course as you might imagine is really key in this environment um and some of you might say well reputation matters in all aid environments all organizations are concerned about reputation and if they get a reputation a poor reputation is going to be harmful to their work and that certainly is true but in these diaspora communities the role of reputation is much higher stakes because it's not just that you're going to professionally have a poor reputation you're in your family network in your friendship network in the village network you will get a bad name and that's something that's considered very damaging not just to you professionally but to you socially so there's there's a very very strong motivation to only recommend someone if you're absolutely confident that they can be a good partner and to only work with people that you are absolutely confident are going to do high quality work for you because the social stakes are very very high and so again I'm happy to talk with you more about this later but there are of course there are advantages and there are also limitations um the folks who I interviewed were very clear to say you know we help people in my village because that's where I know people is from my parents village and my grandparents village I know there's other communities where they need help but I don't have contacts there so it is very much reliant on the social network so the social network brings benefits but it also means you're limited to that population um I thank you for your time I think my time is up I got my zero minute sign and I'm more than happy to talk with you a little bit more later thank you