Danielle Hoogland
World University Service of Canada
Refugees, Displaced Persons and Forced Migration Studies Center Yarmouk University, Jordan عنوان البريد الإلكتروني هذا محمي من روبوتات السبام. يجب عليك تفعيل الجافاسكربت لرؤيته.
August 11, 2024
Refugee Integration in Jordan
Introduction
Jordan currently hosts approximately three million refugees which is the second largest percentage of registered refugees relative to its population in the world (UNHCR, 2024). The Government of Jordan relies on the international community to support the health and well- being of refugees through funding, policies, and programs that decrease their vulnerability and increase their resilience (Jordan Response Plan, 2020). Access to education and employment is critical to support the integration of refugees within their host communities through skill and knowledge development and financial independence (UNHCR, 2023). However, the number of refugees accessing higher education in Jordan in 2022 was approximately 10% (Alkharouf & Bani, 2022), and the number of Syrian youths participating in secondary education was 30% (Jordan Response Plan, 2020). In terms of employment, Jordan’s Department of Statistics (2024) recently posted an overall unemployment rate of 21.4%, a female unemployment rate of 34.7% and a youth unemployment rate of 43.7%. Employment numbers for refugees are difficult to assess due to a fragmented labour market with a high degree of informal participation, however one can assume that unemployment of refugees is much higher than that of local citizens (Mencütek & Nashwan, 2020).
This literature review will examine how international non-governmental organizations (INGOs) support refugee integration, particularly the integration of refugee youth, in Jordan through education and employment strategies. My interest in this topic stems from an upcoming trip to Jordon to volunteer as an Outreach and Engagement Advisor with the Refugees, Displaced Persons, and Forced Migration Studies Centre (RDPFMSC) at Yarmouk University.One of the RDPFMSC purposes is to enhance the inclusion and integration of refugees in Jordan through research, training, initiatives, projects, and policy (RDPFMSC, n.d.).
Through the literature review, I seek research that assesses the effectiveness of these interventions, how their effectiveness is measured, what elements of the policies and programs make them effective, and recommendations for future policy and program creation. I employ a systematic approach through which I will review literature from different sources and research traditions (anthropology, critical policy analysis, feminist, humanitarian, economist) to identify themes, theoretical perspectives and common issues on refugee integration in Jordan. I am particularly interested in refugee youth integration however many of the articles consider the adult population. I am also seeking research that includes examination of how girls and women are considered in program and policy development. The breadth of literature selected is an
attempt to bring multiple perspectives and considerations to my topic. To capture this breadth of information, I searched for articles using google scholar, institutional libraries, and databases using terms including: refugee, Jordan, education, labour market or employment, integration or inclusion, youth, international organisation , program and policy. I excluded refugee integration in Western countries which dominate existing studies and I preferentially included articles written by researchers living in Jordan and the Middle East.
However, by limiting my search to English, I excluded articles from scholars who write in Arabic or other languages. This exclusion may be significant as all search engines and databases selected English articles. I also selected articles and reports that were recent (within the last ten years) and that represented a strong sample of the subject themes within my topic (international programs and policies, education and employment, and economic and social inclusion). I sought to include diverse perspectives, particularly of youth refugees.
I organize this literature review by first defining the terms within my research question. I will describe who the refugees are and the role of the international community in supporting education and employment of refugees. I will then elaborate on different forms of refugee integration (or exclusion) that surfaced in the review. This includes the overlapping spheres ofpolitical, social, economic, and educational integration. I will conclude with general observations and suggestions for future research.
Research terms
Jordan’s Refugees
Jordan has hosted refugees since it was created in 1946. There have been successive waves of refugees from Palestine (1948 and 1967), Iraq (2003), Syria (2011) and other countries. Most studies of refugees in Jordan are done by refugee group (i.e. Palestinian, Iraqi, etc.) because each refugee wave generates national and international responses specific to that group. Because this literature review is focused on the past ten years, refugee studies involving Syrian refugees dominate the literature. Thus, although I did not intentionally exclude other refugee groups, most articles and reports reviewed in this paper concern Syrian refugees. At present, there are 625,025 registered Syrian refugees (UNHCR, 2024) although Government of Jordan figures maintain that there are 1.36 million Syrian refugees (Jordan Response Plan, 2020). Approximately 20% of registered Syrian refugees live in one of three refugee camps (UNHCR, 2024).
National and International Relationship and Response
To support Syrian refugees’ long term, the Government of Jordan created the Jordan Response Plan (JRP) which is a partnership model between the Government of Jordan and the international community (JRP, 2020). It provides rationale and details of the funding required to address refugee, host community, and institutional capacity needs. The plan is constructed to align with the UN Sustainable Development Goals, the Global Compact on Refugees, and the National Plans of Jordan with the aim of decreasing the vulnerability of both refugees and host communities (the JRP’s refugee humanitarian pillar) and providing longer-term sustainable solutions (the JRP’s resiliency pillar). Led by the Government of Jordan, the JRP is a collaborative endeavour among national (government, private sector, institutions and NGOs) and international stakeholders. The plan makes clear that for the JRP to be successful, the international community must abide by their commitments made at the Global Refugee Forum and contribute financially and through service delivery. Given this arrangement of the of refugees, the relationship between the Jordanian host government and international organizations is “an assemblage of overlapping and parallel institutional structures of refugee governance” (Lenner, 2023, p. 282).
Refugee Integration
Political integration
It became clear in reviewing the literature that the word “integration” was problematic because of the legal, and often illegal, status of refugees. Brun (2023) explores the production and experience of legality/illegality of young Palestinian and Syrian refugees in Jordan and Lebanon (aged 15-29 years old) and how legality shapes their lives and possibilities for development. Her article is informed by a previous mixed methods collaborative study between researchers in Jordan, Lebanon, and the UK which included a quantitative survey of 1442 youth followed by “life history” interviews with 293 youth from Jordan and Lebanon (Jordan & Brun, 2021). Brun uses insights from the study to explore what kind of development is possible for youth within the production of legality and illegality amidst protracted displacement. She situates the youth narratives within governance mechanisms used by international and national agencies to examine policy measures and legal statuses which support youth development. Brun’s critical analysis of legality and development is a helpful place to begin this literature review as it highlights two important points that persist throughout the literature.
The first point is that legal status (and therefore access to services, programs, and work) depends on the documents acquired and the length of time the documents are valid (Brun, 2023). Because protracted displacement requires host nation states to respond to emerging challenges or stresses within the refugee group as well as on the host community, the rules and regulations to maintain legality continuously change. This means that refugees move between legality and illegality. Brun (2023) highlights that maintaining legality demands much labour and cost and is a marginalising and humiliating process. For youth, the process is debilitating and immobilizing as they consider education and employment possibilities.
Holst et al. (2023) elaborate this point through their collaborative research that interrogates the situation of Syrian refugee youth in Jordan. Through participatory action research, refugee youth participated in ethnographic methods training, the creation of interview questions which they would use to interview 360 other young Syrian refugees, and workshops to evaluate, analyze, and critically reflect on youth refugee experience. The prevailing belief shared among youth is that there in no future for Syrians in Jordan because of severely
restricted opportunities and a lack of means to affect power structures. The researchers purposively use the research process to disrupt this belief by suggesting youth development programs to focus on waymaking instead of worldmaking (finding ways forward while recognizing the barriers), discernment instead of urgency (finding solutions or pathways that are beyond immediate needs or NGO outputs), and biographical instead of biological (living rather than surviving) elements.
Brun’s (2023) second point is the positioning of refugees as “objects” of the humanitarian-development nexus and a problem to be solved, rather than “subjects” of their own development. Thus, “refugee commodification” is used to attract assistance through compacts and aid agreements between the host nation state and the international community (Brun, 2023). Tobin (2016) articulates the “role of refugee” in her qualitative study of refugee experience in the Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan. Through interviews with NGO staff, she assesses that the “neoliberal governance of the Syrian refugees has resulted in both the privatization of the refugee experience and attempts at cultivating new moral subject and, indeed, the ideal refugee” (p. 5). She elaborates that refugees must navigate the multiple aid and development systems and programs and manage themselves within certain moral parameters to access assistance (e.g. the ‘Cash for Work’ program). The author, who is from Browns University in the United States, is critical of the humanitarian-development system within the camps however her research does not describe her methodology (other than through citing her interviews) nor a description of her analysis of the data. Although it discusses refugee experience, the author provides no evidence of interviewing refugees themselves (only the NGO representatives). None the less, the article is a thought-provoking critique which leaves readers with many questions about how refugees navigate and access the aid and development systems created to support them.
This contextualized framework of political integration of refugees in Jordan overlaps with how refugees are “integrated” into the labour market. The next section will review literature that investigates economic integration including technical vocational education and training (TVET).
Economic Integration
The protracted Syrian refugee crisis prompted the creation of the Jordan Compact in 2016 which is an agreement between the Government of Jordan, the World Bank, and the European Union, to open the Jordanian labour market up to 200,000 Syrian refugees in certain sectors in exchange for major support from the international community for the refugee response as well as economic development in Jordan (Lenner, 2020). United Kingdom researchers Lenner and Turner (2019) analyze the impact of the Jordan Compact, an agreement between the Government of Jordan and international donors to allow Syrian refugees legal work permits in Jordan, according to its stated strategies and framework. Between 2015 and 2017, the authors conducted 60 semi-structured interviews with staff of key agencies implementing the Jordan Compact and with Syrian refugees. Policy documents and media reports were also analyzed. The authors argue that although the Jordan Compact achieved international consensus and enabled multi-stakeholder collaborations, it neglected to consider Jordan’s political economy and the lives and survival strategies of refugees. Three of the Jordan Compact’s strategies (expansion of labour market, substitution of migrant employment for refugee employment, and formalization of employment) represent the tension and contradictions that surface when trying to both support refugee employment in the formal labour market and expand Jordan’s economy. Although the authors do not provide details of their interviews (sample, selection, instrument, and collection of data), their use of a humanitarian and development framework to critically analyze the effectiveness of the Jordan Compact provides important considerations for the development of future “make refugees work” policies. Like Brun’s (2023) criticism of positioning refugees as objects of development, Lenner and Turner (2019) state that “Syrian refugees are very weakly integrated into the networks of humanitarian actors, donors, and governmental agencies… who negotiate their socioeconomic fate” (p.91).
The Jordan Compact is the largest and most significant policy agreement made between the international community and the Government of Jordan to integrate refugees into the labour market and is referenced in all the articles I reviewed on the economic integration of refugees.
Al Husseini (2023) tackled the subject of Syrian vulnerability and integration in Jordan through his study based on existing empiric and academic literature on Syrian refugees as well as qualitative data gathered through discussions with 15 representatives from INGOs and the Jordanian government, and focus groups conducted with Syrian refugees (the refugee sample size and selection, nor the instrument and collection of data were not described). Like Lenner and Turner (2019), Al Husseini’s assessment of the Jordan Compact is that it has been ineffective in reaching its targets and goals due to the “disregard by its signatories of Syrian refugees’ aspirations and the limited capacities of absorption of a largely informal private sector” (p.36).
The lack of consideration of what refugees need and want in employment and educational programming is highlighted in much of the research (El-Ghali et al., 2019; Mencutek & Nashwan, 2021; Shahzadeh, 2020). Naseh et al. (2020), for example, assessed the disconnect between what refugees perceive as their major needs and what service providers believe is needed. These gaps included the supporting the mental health of refugees, the inaccessibility of education for those who are extremely poor, and the challenge of addressing an uncertain future.
The disconnect between the “supply” of work through refugee labour and the “demand” of the formal labour market is also consistently mentioned through the literature (Lenner & Turner, 2019; Mecutek & Nashwan, 2020; Shahzadeh, 2020). Because of the barriers in accessing the labour market, refugees turn to the informal labour market which is unregulated and precarious (Mencutek & Nashwan, 2020). Limited work opportunities also impact enrollment in TVET programs. Through twelve interviews with TVET program providers, Bastaki et al. (2022) analyzed the types of TVET programs available to refugees in Jordan, the admission and completion rates of TVET programs, the transition between TVET and employment, and employment outcomes for refugees who took digital skills training as part of their TVET program. The researchers concluded that TVET is not effective at meeting its goals because of refugee restrictions on labour market access, undesirable work, lack of stable jobs, the perceptions of the effects that formal employment will have on the aid benefits that they receive, structural issues (wages, working hours and transport), and the lure of remote work which is unregulated. The limitation of this research is that there are no interviews with refugees and is therefore biased to the TVET providers’ perceptions. Inclusion of refugees in the evaluation of TVET programs may elucidate other reasons for their lack of participation.
Additional challenges to the effectiveness of programming that supports refugee inclusion into the labour market is the lack of coordination of among service providers as well a between TVET providers and employers. Shahzadeh (2020) speaks to coordination challenges in her report on understanding Syrian and Jordanian youth transitions from education to employment. She writes that “fragmented communication and coordination across governmental agencies, international organizations, and grassroots organizations has proven challenging: doubling efforts in some areas, leaving other areas completely neglected and underserved” (p.21). Al Husseini (2023) calls for further coordination between international agencies to synergize efforts and reduce redundancies. He also describes that the monitoring and evaluation of the projects administered as part of the Jordan Compact has been extremely limited and therefore has reduced the effectiveness, efficiency, visibility and coherence of the response. Ultimately, the literature suggests that international agencies be more “strategic in their selection of interventions and the modalities of their implementation” (Al Husseini, 2023, p. 45).
Social integration
Much of the literature on the economic integration of refugees in Jordan is critical and researchers provide multiple recommendations for improvement. I will turn to the positive and describe some initiatives that stood out as effective at meeting the needs of refugees. These initiatives highlight programs that socially integrate refugees. The ‘Water Wise Plumbers’ program, supported by the German Cooperation Development Agency, targets women and trains them as semi-qualified plumbers who tackle Jordan’s recurring problems of loss of domestic water and water stress (Al Husseini, 2023). The program is recognized as a success not only because it provides work for women, but because it disrupts gender norms, creates opportunities for social inclusion, and generates awareness on water use. A similar vocational skills programme entitled ‘Women and girls Oasis’ funded by the Government of Netherlands at the Zaatari Syrian Refugee Camp in Mafraq, Jordan, was also found to disrupt cultural norms and gender roles, improve self-confidence, build social connections, and increase resiliency and financial security (Jabbar et al., 2015). The theme of empowerment is also highlighted in Mencutek and Nashwan’s (2020) research into employment opportunities and challenges experienced by Syrian refugees. Through their qualitative study they assessed that despite tremendous challenges in labour market, refugees’ abilities to be self-sufficient, contribute to their families’ financial security, and sustain their livelihoods contributed to their sense of dignity and pride. Bastaki et al. (2022) also describe successes that some TVET programs are experiencing, particularly those with an integrated work-learning component and those that include mental health support. What sets effective international programs in supporting refugees apart from others is their cooperation with local organization providers, the target of a vulnerable group (elders, women or youth), access to the program (transportation), consideration of the local labor market characteristics, the ability to meet the needs of program participants (skill development and interests), connections with potential employers or networks, program sustainability, and the emphasis on social inclusion and mental health and well-being (Al Husseini, 2023; Bastaki et al., 2022; Mencutek & Nashwan, 2020, 2021; Shahzadeh, 2020).
Educational integration
The final realm of integration that is covered through this literature review is integration into higher education. This sphere is distinct from economic integration because refugees are not necessarily accessing INGO delivered programs but are entering formal national education systems. Through analysis of results collected through focus group interviews of refugee student and applicants, Alkharouf and Bani (2022) identified challenges facing refugees in accessing higher education in Jordan including cost, low levels of English, a skills and knowledge gap, physical access to campuses, an unclear pathway to the labour market, little incentive or encouragement to pursue higher education, and lack of awareness. El-Ghali et al. (2019) also determined a collapsed pipeline for refugees post primary education through their analysis of primary, secondary and higher education enrollment and persistence data.
Theseand other articles (Al Husseini, 2023; Alkarouf et al., 2023; Jordan Response Plan, 2020; Shahzadeh, 2020) suggest that to increase the number of refugees in higher education, as outlined in the UNHCR’s 15by30 roadmap (2023), significant national policy development and international support is required.
There is consensus within the literature as to what these policy and program interventions should be. Jordanian researchers, Alkarouf et al. (2024), integrated qualitative insights provided through interviews with 135 refugee students into a quantitative framework to suggest policy solutions and initiatives that could increase refugee students’ enrollment rate in Jordan’s higher education system. El-Ghali et al. (2019) used a qualitative interpretive data analysis approach using data from interviews and focus group discussions (19 Jordanian higher education stakeholders), literature, policies, statistics and reports to describe the challenges in enrollment, persistence, funding, financial capacity of families, and pathways to employment.
Despite limitations in both research papers (Alkarouf et al.’s constructed mathematical lacked empirical validation and El-Ghali et al.’s research did not include refugee participants perspectives), their policy recommendations were very similar. Both articles suggest addressing financial and legal barriers, language training and cultural orientation, improving educational infrastructure, coordination of community and international strategies and resources, work integrated learning and career counselling, and cultural and community integration programs.
One recommendation that was absent in both articles was counselling support for refugees who have experienced the psychosocial impacts of conflict and displacement and who lack the optimism to imagine their futures.
Conclusion
Jordan is a fascinating country to study in terms of its response to the waves of refugees fleeing conflict and seeking safety. By design, this literature review highlighted the protracted Syrian refugee crisis and how the Government of Jordan and the international community work to support refugee integration into Jordanian society politically, economically, socially and educationally.
This paper is missing the inclusion of the Jordanian host community perspective. As Mencutek and Nashwan (2021) suggest in their study on labour market integration (which could be extended to all spheres of integration), integration relies on an alignment of four perspectives: the host state, the refugee, the donor (INGO or government), and the host community (Jordanians). A recent report from the Headway, UNHCR (2023) captures the perceptions of Jordanians toward refugees through a quantitative study using a structured questionnaire. Inclusion of this report and other research would ensure Jordanian views are considered in program development that supports refugee integration. It is also important to highlight that although many articles reviewed sought the refugee perspective, many did not or if they did, researchers often purposively selected a non-random sample. This is a weakness in the literature on refugee integration. Future research could seek methodologies, such as Holst et al.’s (2023) collaborative research, that involve and integrate refugees’ perspectives. More creative methodologies, other than qualitative research based on select interviews and a review of the literature, could provide important insights and considerations of refugee experience.
Through the literature review, I have learned that refugee integration in Jordan is one of multiple perspectives and vested interests and changes as the geopolitical tensions and conflicts in the region evolve. A constantly changing landscape requires that international strategies to support refugee integration in Jordan must also be responsive to changing trends and policies.
References
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