 Hello, my name is Lucy Earle, I'm a Principal Researcher and Interim Director of the Human Settlements Group at IID. I lead the Institute's work on urban crises and urban displacement, looking particularly at how city authorities, residents and other stakeholders manage when large numbers of refugees or internally displaced people move into towns and cities. Before working at IID I was an advisor at DFID, the Department for International Development, where I also worked on the theme of urban crises. My name is Boelle McAteer, I work as a researcher in the Human Settlements Group at IID. I have a practitioner background as well as a research one. I worked in DFID for a few years and I've also worked in monitoring and evaluation. And I have a PhD in international development looking at refugee livelihoods in Turkey. So on the research side I'm really interested in refugee lives and well-being and how policy affects people on the ground. So this slide gives some statistical data and background to the issue of forced displacement. UNHCR provides annual global trend reports on the numbers of displaced people. That's the UN Refugee Agency. So in 2021 the total number of people worldwide living in displacement, so people who've fled their homes because of conflict, violence, fear of persecution and human rights violations, was 89.3 million. And this is more than double the 42.7 million people who were displaced a decade ago and the most since World War II. So the figures you can see here, you can see the trends over the last 10 years. And this includes people who've been displaced for those reasons I mentioned within the borders of their own country, they're referred to as internally displaced people or IDPs, as well as refugees and also Venezuelan migrants who don't fall into either of those categories. Some other people in these numbers have been living in exile for decades and that is notably the caseload of people being protected by the UN Refugee Works Agency, UNRA in Palestine. But others in this data will have been displaced in 2021 itself. And once we get the data for 2022, the overall numbers of people displaced is likely to go up because of what's been happening in Ukraine. And the length of displacement is important because the World Bank estimates that around 76% of refugees are displaced for more than five years, so that's people living in protracted displacement. And it's important to note also that the vast majority of the world's refugees and internally displaced people live in lower middle income countries, so roughly four out of five. For IDPs, the estimates on how long IDPs tend to be displaced is much harder to gauge. This is because people may choose not to return to their place of origin and actually integrate into where they have sought safety. But for one reason or another, they may still be labeled as an IDP. And this can lead to sort of inflation of the numbers of people regarded as internally displaced people. So what's really important to remember and what's actually driving this research from my IDP's perspective is that the majority of refugees and probably most IDPs live in towns and cities and they're not in camps. But much of the international community's attention and most humanitarian funding for displaced people goes to camps. Camps for refugees and IDPs are actually temporary. They are designed to save lives in acute phases of an emergency by providing shelter, water, food for people who are displaced by violence and conflict. But the problem is that they stay in place for decades often. And the camps we're looking at in our research projects at IID were established in 1991, 2007 and 2012. And those are in Kenya, Jordan and Ethiopia. And none of them are likely to close anytime soon. I mean, there are rumours of camps being closed in Kenya, but they've been rumours for years. But if they were closed to be closed, there would be serious implications for the welfare of their residents. But humanitarian funding tends to decrease at the time as new crises divert attention like the Ukraine crisis. And the quality of life of residents who can either can't move out or can't work is really seriously impacted. And many will remain a limbo for decades. So the moral argument against camps has been made as this argument about the wasting of lives, the wasting of opportunities. But it's also been lost. And there was a big campaign called the anti-warehousing campaign in the 2000s, which highlighted how people were just being sort of maintained, stored in out of the way regions where they couldn't really move around, where they couldn't work, where they couldn't live normal lives. And this campaign in the 2000s, basically, we can't say it was successful because the practice continues. And we have to recognise that there are incentives for host governments and for UN agencies to establish camps and maintain them. So for government, security concerns are often cited as a reason for camps and restrictions on economic activity and mobility are meant to protect the host population against competition in labour and housing markets, but also to reduce the strain on public services in 1000 cities. Also, the UN has been building and maintaining camps for decades and they're good at it as part of their practice. Our research is really seeking to challenge the assumption that camps are necessary. And we're asking whether more clarity on the economic costs of camps might work as an argument against camps where other arguments have failed. So we're considering whether governments would maybe consider a shift from temporary shelter in camps to long-term accommodation in villages, towns and cities, if, for example, there was large-scale support for infrastructure and public services in these areas. We're also asking, can we back this up with better data on the human costs associated with this wasting of lives or lives on hold? And there are also opportunity costs they want to highlight for host governments and for local communities. So there are contributions that refugees in camps just can't make because of the restrictions on work and on their movement. And finally, there are also environmental costs. Camps often bring about changes in land and resource use nearby when suddenly there are very large numbers of people living in what had been previously uninhabited or sparsely inhabited places. So I'm going to hand over to Boyle now to talk us through one of the research projects that IID is leading that's beginning to address some of these issues around the cost of camps. We have one research project that looks specifically at exploring human costs of refugee camps. And that's called protected displacement in an urban world. This is a camp urban comparison covering four countries. So it looks at refugees in Kenya, Ethiopia and Jordan and internally displaced people or IDPs in Afghanistan. One of the ways we've measured the difference between camp and the urban is by developing a well-being framework and metric using survey data from both refugees and the hosts. So the idea is to get beyond standard vulnerability indicators to understand other factors that also contribute to having a good life in protected displacement. So we can produce overall well-being scores for women and men in camps and urban areas to be able to compare. So we look at five different dimensions of well-being while we do this and these are the ones that you can see on the screen here. So the first dimension is what we call the bodily dimension. So that covers things like access to food, shelter, healthcare and wash. Secondly we've got the economic dimension which covers access to paid labour, education, financial services and also levels of debt. Thirdly we've got the political dimension covering rights, recognition, documentation and community representation. Fourthly we've got the social dimension that covers networks and family, how connected you are to people around you, feeling at home and your access to leisure activities and spaces. And finally we've got the psychosocial dimension which covers things like mental health but also hope and aspirations, how you're feeling about your life and your hopes for the future. So we hope that these dimensions together offer a more holistic understanding of refugee well-being that we've also complemented with interview data from refugees in camps and urban areas. During this research we expected to find that overall well-being is higher for refugees in urban areas than it is in camps but that hosts in urban areas are doing better than the refugees are and this plays out more or less as we expected in Ethiopia and Kenya where well-being scores are higher in the urban areas and much worse in the camps. This is particularly evident in the dimensions of bodily and economic well-being. So one very clear example is that people are much more likely to be hungry in the camps so it seems that there's not enough food and people aren't being provided with enough aid, food aid to feed themselves and there's not enough jobs or income earning opportunities to allow people to buy the food that they need. However the differences aren't as big as we had imagined and one reason is of course that there are many difficulties faced by refugees in cities as well but we also look at a concept called adaptive preference where people in long-term displacement simply start to accept their situation. Now our qualitative interviews and focus groups paints different pictures to the quantitative research that we've been doing as we ask people to talk about what well-being means to them and what a good life could look like rather than rating their satisfaction with their current circumstances which is what we do in the survey. So we think based on that the preference preferences are being adapted to what's available to people in camps and urban areas respectively. And in Jordan the camp and the urban well-being scores are actually very similar. There are bigger differences between gender so there's bigger differences between men and women than there are between camp and urban refugees and why is that? Why does life seem so similar for refugees in Zatari versus refugees in Amman? We think that the reasons are mainly economic. The government of Jordan has done a really good job of maintaining donor focus on the Syrian crisis and bringing in humanitarian funding to support camps but this level of funding can't go on forever and it's not a very good use of the limited humanitarian aid that's available as it's being spent on temporary, expensive and unsustainable interventions. I'm now going to hand back over to Lucy who's going to talk a bit more about what this economic cost of camps can look like. So moving on to the question of the economic costs of camps this is at the heart of another project that IID is leading where we're working again in Jordan but this time specifically with engineers and water experts. So this project is called the Jordan Urban Refugee Dividend and it's a two and a half year project with three partners where we're focusing on comparing the costs of water sanitation and hygiene or wash in a camp and a city and the camp we're looking at is the same camp we heard about from Boel Zatari camp in Jordan where there really has been quite massive expenditure and as a result of that quality of life for refugees living in that camp has been shown to be not so significantly different or better than for refugees living in the capital city or Oman. This is what we showed in our other research project but we have to bear in mind though that Zatari is the newest camp in our study. So it was set up in 2012. We're also looking at Dadaab in Kenya which was established in 1991 and Iciter in Ethiopia established in 2007. In these other camps as noted by Boel people are going hungry and the international donor community is to an extent contributing to the situation by continuing to provide minimal support to the camps rather than working with the government to consider other solutions. So this other project on the refugee dividend is trying to explore what those other solutions could look like and there we're working with engineers and water specialists to look at what could have been achieved for sustainable water and sanitation infrastructure in an urban area had the money spent on a camp been invested there instead. So we're looking specifically at Wash who would have liked to have looked at a wide range of other sectors even possibly the total cost of the camp but this is a small project we had to not be quite so ambitious so we're looking just at water sanitation and hygiene in Zatari and then considering what those costs were and looking at what could have been bought without money in Mafraq city nearby which is a city which is also home to many tens of thousands of refugees. What we're finding though is that no one really wants to tell us or they can't tell us how much has been spent in Zatari on Wash and this is partly because mistakes were made when the camp was first established and it continues to be an extremely expensive endeavor to provide wash in the camp noting that Jordan is a country that's incredibly water scarce but there's another reason as well and it seems that the UN and the Jordanian government either can't or aren't interested in disaggregating the humanitarian spend by location so whether it's money going towards a camp or going towards a city or even going towards a rural area and as a result it's impossible to use official figures to evaluate the costs and benefits of hosting refugees in camps as compared with other areas. We are doing what we can though to try and work out what has been spent in Zatari camp on water and sanitation in the 10 years that it's been in existence and to do that we're following the money. We've identified the cost drivers and we're looking at the information in the public domain on what has been spent on for example trucking water to Zatari so big trucks full of drinking water and water for cooking showers etc and wastewater removal. The construction of shower blocks sinking of boreholes so this is when the camps were moving away from the sort of really temporary solution of trucking to an intermediate solution with boreholes. The cost of connecting household to our water and wastewater networks the construction of wastewater treatment plant that's happened in Zatari and then the ongoing maintenance and running costs. It's a bigger endeavor and it's proving hard to find the information we need but we're going to publish an article online about our findings and also the process what we had to do to get this information in spring of this year. So I'm now going to hand over to Boelle again to speak some more about opportunity costs and the data we have on this from the protracted displacement in an urban world project. Knowing all of this about the economic costs and the human costs of refugee camps you might be asking yourselves what we think the solutions might look like. Another part of the protracted displacement in an urban world project looks at exploring untapped livelihoods opportunities in the cities what we might call opportunity costs. So looking at the graph you see on the screen here this covers the proportion of refugees that we have interviewed having a source of income from work at the time they were interviewed. So the green proportion is people who do have an income from work and the orange proportion is people who don't have an income from work at the time. So you might notice immediately that there's more green in the cities so more people are working in the cities which is what we would expect to find but there is quite a lot of orange in the cities as well and so why is that? In many countries with an encampment policy refugees are denied the right to free movement and also have restrictions on where and how they can work. So as a result of course their income earning opportunities are very reduced. What our data does is it demonstrates that there are work ready populations who are unable to reach their potential so they do have skills but they're still unable to find work in camps because jobs are very often just not available and in cities because of other blockers. So these other blockers can be things like harassment, it can be demands for bribes and other restrictions on work that make daily life really very difficult for refugees in cities as well. So this is not just a human cost but it's also an opportunity cost to city governments because refugee businesses and workers are driven underground so people work informally and local authorities are not benefiting from the tax revenues that they could be receiving. On this slide you can see a list of assets and challenges that either help or hinder refugees from working or starting a business. Refugees in cities are generally much more likely to have assets that they need to work or to start a business and this is just like the well-being very clear in Ethiopia and Kenya but less pronounced in Jordan and importantly across all three countries men are far more likely to hold these assets than women are. So the assets you can see here include prior skills, financial, physical and social assets and the legal right to work. On the challenges side we know that refugee livelihoods are restricted in many places and many refugees either don't work or are doing jobs that don't reflect their skills and their experience and this is because of restrictions in mobility as you can see here. Access to work permits is also a big challenge for many people. Many refugees are also not able to open bank accounts or access loans which would give them capital that they need to start a business. For refugees in enterprises and people who do manage to start a business growth is very often constrained either because they can't invest or because they resort to exploitative partnerships with hosts to get around the restrictions which we found in Avis and Amman is very common. So that's because of the legal restrictions on ownership that makes refugees are not allowed to own things on their own. But in some contexts these partnerships allow local economies to thrive so we've also found good examples of this in Eastleigh and Nairobi where the ties are very strong between the Somali-Kenyan community and the Somali refugee community. Finally, bribes adds an additional financial burden on refugees and of course harassment creates additional challenges for refugees who do work. The most important takeaway here is that there are lots of missed opportunities in cities. People who are skilled and experienced who still struggle to make ends meet. So to conclude a bit more information about what we're going to be doing this year and into the future on these themes. So these two projects we've talked about today the Protracted Displacement in an Urban World Project and the Jordan Urban Refugee Dividend Project will both conclude in October of this year and we'll be publishing most of our results over the coming months in policy briefs, working papers and online and media pieces. Some of our academic articles will be coming out in 2024 but the bulk of the findings will be shared this year. We also have some other projects related to these that are ongoing. One of those is called Living in Difference and in Common and that's using ethnographic film and walks in Nairobi with refugees to understand their daily lives and interactions in the city and that also focuses on some refugees who are LGBTQ. We have a new project that's just getting started in Jordan where we're working with refugees to understand what their needs are for data and for their own advocacy purposes and to build research and data gathering capacity amongst refugee organizations so that it can lead their own discussions with local government with UN about what they need in the city. We're going to carry on working with city authorities and municipalities. That's a big aspect of the Protracted Displacement Project that we haven't talked about here but we have set up forums at each of the four cities where we're working and some of that engagement will continue into the future. We'd like to take some of these ideas to Kampala, Uganda where we think there's a real need for some participatory activities between refugee organizations, people living in informal settlements and local government and then we've also applied for more funding to look in more detail our Refugee Wellbeing Index and really refine that but alongside those projects there's some other steps that we will be taking. I mean we need to really have concerted advocacy with national and city governments to make sure they recognize the presence of urban refugees in their cities, the capacities, the aspirations and their needs and to incorporate them into urban and regional planning processes. We also need to make sure that humanitarian development funding is reaching the people on the front lines in cities so that they're able to provide services to all their residents regardless of where they come from. We will be advocating for a setup where refugee hosting countries are offered significant finance up front to absorb new populations in towns and cities when there is a displacement crisis. We will also be advocating for more support for refugee enterprise so that they have access to finance and moving barriers to registering and running a business. We really want to push back on this idea that if a refugee is living in a town or city then they must be self-reliant because they're not receiving any aid. We need to show that actually their standard of living is really very low and that it's dangerous to just assume that people are self-reliant. And we want to encourage the humanitarian sector to focus on what it means to live a good life in exile not just to bear it to maintain people on a bare state of existence but to support a life that we would hope for if we were displaced. If you'd like to know more about this work the larger project we discussed has its own website protracteddisplacement.org. You can also find out more about our work in general on urban crises and forced displacement on our urban page on iid's website. You can email me in boel and you can also follow us on twitter. Thank you.