Significant portions of urban refugees cannot cover health expenses, care for women during & after childbirth particularly poor in camps, shows study
Photo: iStock People displaced from their hometowns and residing in camps don’t receive enough food and have limited access to healthcare, a new study showed.
A staggering 110 million people were forcibly displaced around the world as of May 2023. Nearly half of those internally displaced and 20 per cent of all the refugees live in camps, according to estimates by the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), an independent research organisation.
Camps intended as temporary solutions to crises often become homes for displaced people for decades when conflicts persist, the report showed. These camps lack long-term strategic planning and facilities are poor, highlighted the authors of the paper released September 22, 2023.
These temporary living arrangements are usually created in remote areas, and there are restrictions on movement and work of the refugees, they added.
The researchers compared the wellbeing and livelihoods of refugees and internally displaced people in camps and urban areas – the first large-scale assessment of its kind.
The project, Protracted Displacement in an Urban World, focused on one camp and one city in each of Ethiopia, Kenya, Jordan and Afghanistan.
These included:
The study, according to the authors, was structured around four ‘myths’ that became apparent during the project — that displaced people in cities are self-reliant; that they are younger and better-educated than those in camps; that camps offer effective safe havens and / or safety nets and that camps can become stand-alone settlements.
For the survey in cities, the researchers chose neighbourhoods with high concentrations of refugees.
A majority of refugee households in Nairobi (76 per cent) and Addis Ababa (88 per cent) receive no humanitarian assistance, they found. The situation was very different in Amman, where 73 per cent of refugees reported receiving aid, the researchers wrote.
Among those receiving aid, 20 per cent individuals surveyed were living in a household where humanitarian assistance was the main source of income, the findings showed.
While the numbers of refugees / internally displaced people earning an income from work was higher in the city than in the camp across all of the countries in the study, the percentages are not uniformly high across countries, according to the analysis.
In Kenya and Ethiopia, the urban displaced were found to be doing better than their camp counterparts, but there are significant proportions of the urban refugee population who say they cannot cover their expenses (33 per cent in Kenya and 61 per cent in Ethiopia), the researchers observed.
In Jordan, 84 per cent of urban refugees and 86 per cent of encamped refugees said they could not cover their expenses, they wrote. Urban refugees in the West Asian country do not have better economic well-being than their counterparts in the camp, the study showed.
Regarding healthcare, overall, 69 per cent of people responded positively in the camps, as compared with 83 per cent in the cities, the authors noted in the report.
Women were more likely to say they could not access healthcare, they added. Reports of the qualitative interviews suggested that services and care for women during and after childbirth were particularly poor in the camps.
The survey also found that those who move to live in towns and cities are not just young, single men.
Humanitarian and development programmes need to support local and national governments and provide incentives for authorities to remove the most pronounced barriers that stop displaced people achieving a decent life in the city, the authors highlighted.
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