January 28, 2025

Graduation: a viable intervention for refugees

Lauren Hendricks

As global conflicts, famine, natural disasters, climate change, and human rights violations force people to flee from their homes and migrate across the globe at unprecedented rates, organizations dedicated to helping people in extreme poverty face a host of new challenges. With these issues projected to affect over one billion people by 2050, we must scale long-term solutions to support refugees and help them acclimate and thrive in new environments.  

Being a refugee is no longer a temporary condition. In 2023 there were 59 protracted refugee situations  in 37 countries where at least 25,000 refugees from the same country lived in exile for more than five years.  While most want to return home, some can spend decades living in camps or settlements.  Without livelihoods, skills, and income, the time spent in limbo is a recipe for crime, despair, and social unrest, especially for young people displaced during their formative years.              

In addition to not knowing if and when they can return to their home countries, many refugees lack safe places to live or the ability to work legally in host countries. They may not be able to access land, take loans, and face  many barriers to employment other than low paying jobs as day laborers or street vendors, while competition for jobs may exacerbate tension between refugees and host countries. Access to education is limited for many school-age refugees, and nearly half are unable to attend school at all.  Children in school are less likely to participate in gangs, child labor or criminal activity.  Girls are less likely to experience early marriage and pregnancy.

One proven effective mode of intervention is Graduation, an evidence-based approach to help people living in extreme poverty build self-reliance and resilience by developing sustainable livelihoods with support through asset transfers, financial training, coaching, peer-based savings groups, and links to existing public services for health, nutrition, disabilities, legal assistance, and psychosocial support.  

Trickle Up was the first organization to adapt the Graduation Approach to the specific needs of refugees and people facing displacement through collaboration with UNHCR and feasibility studies in ten major refugee hubs. Recently, Trickle Up has worked with local partner organizations to support migrants and refugees in Uganda and Colombia.

UGANDA:

In Western Uganda’s Kamwenge District, home to the Rwamwanja Refugee Settlement, many resident households face food insecurity and strained resources due to the arrival of 50,000 refugees over the past four years from the Democratic Republic of Congo, South Sudan, and other neighboring countries. Trickle Up has worked with the AVSI Foundation and the American Institutes for Research to implement the USAID-funded Graduating to Resilience Activity since 2017, supporting 13,000 refugee and Ugandan households to shift from dependency on humanitarian support to self-reliance.  

Using the Graduation Approach to support these households offers a sequenced pathway for families to set goals, track progress with a coach, save with peers, gain support for market-based businesses, and build agency and self-confidence to succeed in their businesses and achieve greater social inclusion.   

In addition to the 80% of households who graduated out of poverty by the end of the program, approximately 61% of households maintained their progress for 18 months.  

USAID Administrator Samantha Power commended the project in her testimony to Congress as a replicable and scalable solution that yielded four times the social benefits for every dollar invested.  In fact, Graduation has reemerged as a formula to achieve long-term resilience and support truly sustainable development for the world’s most vulnerable people.  

Colombia: 

As a result of political unrest, economic decline, and acute shortages of vital resources, over 7.7 million Venezuelans have left the country, almost three million of whom have migrated to Colombia, which now hosts the highest number of Venezuelan refugees. For the past two years, Trickle Up has worked with three local organizations – the Carvajal Foundation, the Corporation Organization El Minuto de Dios and the Secretariat of Social Pastoral of the Dioces of Palmira – to implement FOCO, a pilot program employing the Graduation Approach in the cities of Cali and Palmira, now home to almost 137,000 Venezuelan migrants. 

The situation in Columbia has evolved from an emergency humanitarian crisis to an ongoing need to stabilize and integrate the Venezuelan population. But Venezuelan migrants face xenophobia and barriers to employment that include a lack of access to education, documentation, bank accounts, and access to phones or the internet.  

FOCO works to integrate Venezuelan refugees – socially, economically, and politically – into the communities in which they live by developing their readiness for employment and building pathways toward self-employment. Social cohesion remains the most significant barrier to ensuring Venezuelans can build a new life in Colombia and access economic opportunities, healthcare, and education. By addressing stereotypes and gender norms in Venezuelan and Colombian communities in Cali and Palmira, Trickle Up is creating a more responsive environment for refugees that acknowledges the reality of protracted crises and implementing solutions for long-term and resilient pathways out of poverty.

Adapting the Graduation Approach: 

In both Uganda and Colombia, Trickle Up has seen firsthand the success of using a tailored Graduation Approach to support refugee self-reliance. Though both countries have relatively progressive policies to support migrants and refugees, such as allowing migrants to own land and access the formal job market, refugees and migrants still face unique challenges and instability beyond poverty.  

Acknowledging long-term challenges facing refugees and migrants requires programs that encourage social integration and build upon the knowledge of local organizations closely connected to these communities. Trickle Up’s experience understanding the nuances of different displacement scenarios allows for direct implementation as well as technical assistance to larger iNGOs and local organizations. Because Graduation is a model that can be taught and scaled, Trickle Up has been able to ensure that a wide range of participants can access its benefits.  

Programs that move people from emergency humanitarian assistance to self-reliance, resilience, and sustainable livelihoods, are an investment that makes sense. Though the upfront costs of Graduation can be high, we know it works; research continues to prove that once people graduate out of extreme poverty, they tend to stay out of poverty. When refugees become independent and self-supporting, the visible evidence of their economic contributions leads to greater acceptance. 

Over the past two decades, we have seen the Graduation Approach evolve into a powerful intervention and solution to poverty alleviation. Seeing its successful adaptation for refugees and migrants, our next step is expanding to other countries to reach even more people living in extreme poverty in the face of these protracted crises.  

References:


This piece has been published on socialprotection.org.

Lauren Hendricks
Lauren Hendricks brings over 30 years of experience in the humanitarian and development sectors across Africa, Europe, Latin America, and Asia. With a focus on sectors such as financial inclusion, agriculture, SME development, gender inclusion, women’s empowerment, and technology, she is committed to ensuring marginalized communities have the information and resources they need to thrive. […]

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