employment SUPPORT DRC MENA livelihoods learning programme DECEMBER 2017

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1 employment SUPPORT DRC MENA livelihoods learning programme DECEMBER 2017 Danish Refugee Council MENA Regional Office 14 Al Basra Street, Um Othaina P.O Box Amman, Jordan The Danish Refugee Council (DRC) is a humanitarian, nongovernmental, non-profit organisation founded in 1956 that works in more than 40 countries throughout the world. DRC fulfils its mandate by providing direct assistance to conflict affected populations refugees, Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) and host communities in the conflict areas of the world and by advocating on their behalf internationally and in Denmark. Men work in a livelihoods programme in Sanad, Azraq Camp, Jordan. August Photo by: Louise Wateridge/ DRC

2 DRC began a three-year learning journey in 2017 in the Middle East region, aimed at better understanding the roles that an international NGO can best play in supporting the livelihoods of conflict- and displacement-affected people. DRC has started to face big strategic challenges by building up an evidence base about how its projects are working and the impact that they are having. 1 Final conclusions cannot be drawn at the end of the first year of the journey. However, DRC believes that reflections stimulated by its own learning journey may be relevant to others often running similar interventions for supporting livelihoods, and facing similar challenges. This paper on business support, and a companion paper on employment support, should be seen not as recommendations for the sector, but rather as food for thought, containing as many questions as they do suggestions for answers. Introduction: DRC s employment support interventions in the Middle East Employment support provided by DRC in the region typically starts with a registration process combined with individual counselling and/or group legal awareness sessions. Referrals to training and/or open vacancies for internships or paid jobs are then facilitated. Training is short-term, from a few days to 3 months maximum. It is focused on employability skills (e.g. language, CV development, interview preparation, etc.) or on the development of technical skills (either through formal vocational education or through private teachers and coaches). DRC subsidise internships (up to USD 400 per month paid to the intern) and in some cases, supports job placements through wage subsidies, temporary coverage of social security costs, payment of part or all costs associated with obtaining a work permit. Protection monitoring, through checking on working conditions and facilitating the dialogue between employers and employees, is also part of most employment support projects. Project duration is commonly 6 to 12 months, with a few projects lasting up to 18 months. On average per project, DRC provides legal information to 1500 to 2500 people, individual counselling to 250 to 500 people, training to (employability) and (technical) people. For subsidised internships or job placements, DRC usually reached about 50 to 100 people per project. Technical/implementation issues Monitoring Even when project monitoring has been comprehensive, little data has been available on key questions which affect how programmes are designed and managed. In particular, more information is needed about job retention over time (how many people stay for how long in positions after a period of subsidised placement or training). Any meaningful analysis about what impact can be expected for any given programme budget needs this information to understand how to translate analysis of the cost-efficiency of placements (how much does it cost to match a client with a placement?) into an understanding of cost-effectiveness (how much does it cost for each person who is retained in a job and for how long?). A challenge is that this data cannot be collected during the lifetime of a project, because the question of job retention may only arise as a short-term project is ending, and its budget closed. 1 For more information and lessons about DRC s learning journey, see journey 2 THEMATIC PAPER EMPLOYMENT SUPPORT

3 Where funding horizons are short-term, mechanisms have to be found for programmes to incorporate longer-term monitoring beyond their own lifetimes. If projects are treated more as stages in a multi-year programme, implementing organisations can put M&E mechanisms in place to assess the programmes rather than the projects. M&E works most usefully when M&E staff and project managers see their relationship as one of service provider and clients (the programmes), with information being supplied according to demand. (This is different from a relationship where M&E is gathering information by central management about project implementation, e.g. for donor reporting.) Market information DRC has tried to ensure that decisions on investments in technical training and internships were based on the best available knowledge of conditions of the employment market. Using (labour) market studies proved to be more difficult than anticipated: projects knew that it was important to understand markets, but did not necessarily know what information they needed or how to incorporate it into decisions making. Any general market study would not be specific enough or localised enough to be useful, but it is not clear that project staff can ever acquire the knowledge they need of every potential employment sector and understand likely future trends. However, the alternative cannot be to provide training without regard to what employment opportunities markets are making available. A way has to be found to become more market aware without hoping to acquire unlimited information about markets. It may be possible to combine a better general, more qualitative understanding of how certain markets work with much less specific data. Efficient information networks for providing that overall feel for markets might mean more relationships with different kinds of people. Rather than mainly looking to professionals in formal or official positions related to markets or partner NGOs doing similar programming, this could mean spending more time talking to displaced people who have found work, established businessmen, business-mentors, people who work in sectors that clients show interest in, etc. Individuals usually manage their lives in market economies without formal market studies. More reflection is now needed on what information exactly will be useful and for which specific decisions. This reflection will also need to consider which decisions are ultimately made by DRC and which by clients and if informed decisions are going to be made, who is responsible for being informed about the market. Application system The number of people whom DRC can ever potentially help is inevitably small in relation to the number which needs assistance. Information systems (including word of mouth, and social media) within displacement-affected communities have meant that the opportunities offered by projects have been widely known, and there have been fewer complaints or misunderstandings about selection procedures than might have been imagined. The selection process has thrown up instead different challenges. It appears that in some countries at least, some refugees have felt it a shame to request assistance from an INGO: paradoxically, these may be just the sort of people whom an agency most wants to help. Less direct assistance, aimed at making it easier for them to find work for themselves, might be more useful to them. THEMATIC PAPER EMPLOYMENT SUPPORT 3

4 Information collection was a heavy workload, for two reasons. Information was collected about all applicants, and in some cases far more people applied than could ever have been helped. Secondly, not all the information collected has been obviously useful, and it has been recognised that the information given is not always accurate or truthful. The whole process of questioning and counselling shapes the relationship and the set of expectations and responsibilities between the prospective client and the aid agency, e.g. creating an expectation by the client that DRC would find them a job. However, the interaction with clients was designed mainly by instrumental needs (collecting the information that DRC needed, providing the information clients needed to engage with DRC, etc.), rather than using the whole engagement to shape the relationship in a particular way. More reflection will be given to the design of the interaction with clients and prospective clients. The agency has to gain the information it needs to best help applicants and clients, but this should be done in a way that reduces the data burden on the organisation and which helps to create the relationship which is wanted, especially regarding expectations, roles and responsibilities. As DRC reflects on the role that it wishes to play in the lives of displacement-affected people (see below), it may be possible too to consider how different interactions with clients could create expectations and relationships that better fit with how DRC wishes to share responsibilities with clients. A counselling process has become a standard part of all interactions between clients and DRC, and which pathways they are helped to follow has been derived from this process. DRC now wants to understand much better how much has counselling helped in helping clients to know their best options, or helped DRC to understand how best to help them. All people are not the same: so for which kinds of clients does counselling make a difference to their outcomes? Workload Current modalities place a very heavy burden on agency staff. Just to find a reasonable number of internship or employment openings requires knocking door-to-door to speak to possible employers. At the other end is an equally intense effort to assess potential interns, because DRC takes responsibility for matching their skills with employers needs. Although this burden may reduce in future years if relationships with employers continue, this cannot be guaranteed, especially because some employers resent or are suspicious of the degree of questioning that DRC feels obliged to engage in, if clients are to be protected from potentially exploitative or abusive situations. This is one factor that has contributed to limiting the number of clients that DRC has been able to help, typically less than 100 per project. The goal of helping displaced people into work remains important. Employment support has offered people affected by displacement a chance to make connections with employers and with that, a possible route into working life. A review of all the individual tasks which staff are currently performing and the time which each one takes may offer clues to how ways of working can be modified to reduce staff workload. This goes beyond a discussion of time management: the more fundamental question about the role of an INGO, and which responsibilities it should take on itself, will be critical to this discussion (see below on job quality and client protection.) 4 THEMATIC PAPER EMPLOYMENT SUPPORT

5 Subsidies Some employers have said that the referral of a client by an INGO was in itself enough for them to agree to take on unknown people whom they would have otherwise considered a risk. In many cases, though, employers hesitation to take on displaced people, or certain other population groups affected by displacement, has been countered by the incentive of a financial subsidy by DRC, usually for 2-3 months. This has encouraged some employers to give them a chance for a period, during which clients can establish a relationship and hopefully longer-term work. Clients difficulties in taking on positions have sometimes been addressed with direct payments, e.g. allowances for attending training, or transport allowances. Setting the level of subsidies and payments is not simple. If set too high, it may not only prove expensive (and so reduce the number of people who can be helped), but prove counter-productive. If employers see the placement programme simply as an opportunity for free short-term labour, they may see no incentive to retaining the client after the subsidy ends. The agency s need to meet its targets may result in no net impact if it creates a situation where employers use the scheme to replace normal recruitment. Setting subsidies levels by reference to local wage levels may not sit easily with the commitment to seeing people able to live at a minimum standard through their work, where market rates are very low. The learning so far has not indicated any obvious direction for tackling this difficult question. Only two obvious recommendations have been drawn so far. Country teams need to be aware of the issue, and to be as explicit as they can about the rationale for giving subsidies, for the level of those subsidies and the assumptions that underpin that rationale. These can then be tested. We are intending to prioritise this issue to learning in the coming year, particularly looking at job retention, employment pathways and employer behaviour. Training For many, training has played a critical role in facilitating job openings. However, designing and running training is time consuming and expensive, and it is important to get it right. Including standard training packages as a part of a placement programme may not always be optimal. Clients vary enormously in their levels of skill and experience. Some only underwent training in order to obtain placements, which was a waste of their time and of scarce aid resources. In other countries, decisions have to be taken over whether or not training should lead to qualifications, which some clients say they need to get jobs. Short-term aid programmes struggle to offer courses leading to certification where these take one to two years. However, if such courses leading to recognised qualifications are worthwhile, the effectiveness of aid programmes is being limited by project length, which has often been determined by the aid bureaucracy rather than by what is actually needed. On the job training or one-to-one training has often proved to be the most appreciated but it is also the most expensive. The tension between the desire to help more people and the desire to maximise the welfare of a given client group has not always been explicitly recognised and discussed. Choosing which courses to offer is also challenging. It is easy to get sucked into following years of previous aid programming, because these have shaped the expectations and aspirations of clients as well as project staff and others. However, it is not clear if more imaginative courses would lead to jobs, and if so which courses those are. A particular question lies over the kind of training that would most benefit women. These questions form part of the puzzles discussed under market information (above) and gender (below). THEMATIC PAPER EMPLOYMENT SUPPORT 5

6 More fundamentally, recruitment relies far more on personal connections than on objective criteria such as qualifications. This makes it difficult to know in which circumstances helping people to a qualification is the most effective way of helping them to obtain a job (See wasta, below). The challenge for DRC is to streamline the application and counselling process and yet at the same time to get better at responding to the individuality of each client. Thought is needed about how to assess what training would really help and is wanted by each individual. DRC already tries to use placements as internship-like opportunities, with a training element. It may be that more emphasis can be put on this dimension of placements and internships. Training courses are only one way of learning or developing skills. We should also explore how we could facilitate clients to find their own ways of improving skills. Work permits (country specific) and the informal economy Permits often tie a refugee to an employer, but offer some protection to the refugee. Refugees have to balance their need for flexibility with security, and the role of a work permit can be ambiguous, where a freelance work permit is not offered. It has been found that there are numerous, and often contradictory, reasons why a refugee may or may not want a permit. However, an employer can have little incentive to apply for the permit. Not only does applying involve financial and administrative costs, but where a work permit gives a refugee employment rights, it may undermine the very reason why an employer was willing to take on a refugee, i.e. the ability to pay them less, and offer them no benefits. (Any fines for employing illegal have usually been passed on indirectly to the refugee.) DRC is in a difficult position. Not only would it prefer to see refugees with work permits from a protection perspective, but it would struggle to be associated with assisting people to work illegally, even when most opportunities for refugees are in the informal sector. It is very unclear how DRC can or should relate to the informal sector for refugees. DRC can look to engage more with the informal sector for IDPs (e.g. in Iraq), and it may learn more there about what people need to find opportunities in this sector. Much of this discussion will inevitably link to that on broader ways of working, e.g. when DRC should work on direct placements for clients (for which it may retain some legal responsibility) and when it would choose to adopt approaches that more indirectly facilitate refugees to take advantage of opportunities they find for themselves. This latter approach would leave DRC with less responsibility for outcomes which means also with less possibility of mitigating risks on behalf of clients. Wider issues Cost and coverage Where livelihood assistance to refugees and others affected by displacement has grown out of protection programming, it tends to maintain to some degree the paradigm of maximising the 6 THEMATIC PAPER EMPLOYMENT SUPPORT

7 welfare of each individual client. This may be understandable, but it does not sit easily with an objective of being most cost-effective in order to offer help to as many people as possible with given resources. Simple metrics of unit cost per client may be dangerous (incentivising the targeting of those easiest to help with token support), but it is also necessary for an NGO to know, and to think about, how much it costs to find each client a job. Some explicit discussion is needed to decide what cost per job would be considered an acceptable price for different client profiles. Such a discussion should lead to some exploration of the possibility of alternative models for helping refugees and other client groups to find employment. Ideally, there would be models that would offer much greater cost-effectiveness, without compromising client safety, and without skewing targeting. The cost/workload burden is one factor that has limited the coverage of current working models. A second factor has been the limited number of opportunities offered by the local economy (and, in some cases, the competition between organisations to find those opportunities for their own clients). The scale of need demands that responses scale up significantly. However, NGOs do not create jobs: at best, they can address some of the additional constraints that displaced people face in finding jobs compared to their hosts. But if job or placement opportunities are simply not available for scale-up, this raises a deeper question: how far is an NGO project addressing the clients main constraint to employment? In order to answer this question, NGOs need a much greater understanding of how people find, choose and succeed in obtaining opportunities outside of aid programmes. Targeting Two big questions have been raised around targeting. One is the common targeting debate, how far assistance should be targeted at those most in need, or who face the most obstacles in finding work. Is it enough just to know that clients are unemployed and employable, because they should have the right like everyone else to work to support their families? If a more difficult target group is chosen, then more realistic expectations have to be set: pressure to deliver results is legitimate but the results demanded have to match the rationale of the project. The second question is how to balance assistance to refugees and host communities. Various quotas or targets have been set, but the rationale behind them has been political, and not based on relative need or even the relative appropriateness of a particular form of assistance. An argument has been advanced that, because of legal issues, self-employment is better targeted at refugees whilst employment support better suits host communities. This raises much deeper questions about programming and ways of working though, that have yet to be explored in depth. Current project models, even for giving support to host communities, are derived from refugee assistance, aimed at addressing the specific additional constraints that displacement has brought in finding work. If targeting should be more simply on poverty grounds, ignoring the displacement status, then the rationale for this kind of programming is less clear. In other words, if there were no refugee crisis, would the same employment support programming be considered justified or appropriate in those same host communities? Governments may sometimes oblige agencies to assist citizens, but which kinds of livelihood support would be most appropriate for this? Gender Most programmes have tried to ensure that both men and women received training and opportunities for placements. On its own, though, this has not meant that projects were necessarily gender appropriate. Some women could not continue with training because the atmosphere was too male ; others were unwittingly given the burden of having to find male chaperones to spend their time sitting with them during training. Many other women did not see work opportunities as helpful to them at all, in a society where women are expected to marry when young and then to devote themselves to the home. Although there is often a demand for female labour (e.g. in hotels), this was in sectors considered not to be respectable by many. Should an INGO accept a norm that employment and economic responsibility is for men, while women take domestic responsibilities? An INGO has to be sensitive to cultural and religious norms, THEMATIC PAPER EMPLOYMENT SUPPORT 7

8 but there may also be ways in which to assist women who want to challenge some gender norms, e.g. on what are considered male or female professions, or to help them to overcome some of the constraints thrown up by such norms, e.g. limited freedom of movement. It is not clear exactly what a gender sensitive employment support programme in the Middle East region ought to look like. Presumably, in-depth discussions over time with women (from among the displaced populations and the host communities) should help in developing some ideas. Job quality and client protection A major incentive for employers in taking on refugees is to find people to do jobs that are hard to fill, i.e. difficult work, jobs of poor quality and for low pay. This is an economic reality for refugees and migrants all over the world. This raises two serious questions. How far are refugees glad to take any opportunity, knowing that it at least enables them to eat and is a first step on ladder, offering a chance to move on to progressively better work? If this is the case, then NGOs should be measuring their impact less by looking at job retention and the duration of placements and more on what came next, understanding why refugees chose to take on an unpleasant job and why they then left. The second question has been a running theme through much of the learning process: where does responsibility lie? How far is it the agency s job to do due diligence to ensure that it is not putting a client into a potentially exploitative situation (e.g. where they are not paid their wages), and to ensure that the working conditions are fair and the remuneration appropriate? Or could insisting on minimum conditions of employment result in there being fewer opportunities made available, which potentially some refugees would have preferred to nothing? It is not easy to strike a balance between supporting the informed choice of a client so that they can take responsibility for their own choices with the demand not to have put a client in harm s way. Ultimately, progress will be possible if ways can be found to empower displaced people to challenge and stand up to abuse, and to collectively warn each other of potential abusers, but achieving these kinds of goal will demand longer-term strategies and much more collaboration between aid agencies. Wasta and social capital Most employment in the countries where DRC has worked is found through connections and relationships ( wasta ) rather than through western models of objective, criteria-based recruitment selection. This poses challenges for a project which, although wasta is obviously well understood by the staff, is designed for a more western style employment environment. It raises questions about approaches to training, if skills are ultimately secondary in gaining employment; it may limit the interest of employers in their interns to the period of the subsidy, i.e. the clients may only be cheap labour for unpleasant work, since real jobs are given to people the employers know. However, taking on board wasta may also offer opportunities for interventions. An INGO can help people acquire skills: can it also facilitate their acquisition of wasta or social capital? This may mean finding placements for clients which are designed to help them build connections, or it may be working with them to acquire social networks that enable them to find their own jobs. Although working with wasta might challenge an INGO on issues around accountability and transparency, it might be possible to frame this around building social capital for refugees (the positive meaning in wasta), giving them greater power in negotiations, rather than simply as leveraging wasta in the sense of nepotism. In order to see if this can be made to work, DRC will have to understand in much greater detail how successful refugees have found work, how jobs are applied for and won, which kinds of personal contact are useful in which ways in short, the detailed mechanics of how wasta works among refugees and in the societies where they are living. 8 THEMATIC PAPER EMPLOYMENT SUPPORT

9 Danish Refugee Council / Middle East Office livelihoods.learning@drc-mena.org THEMATIC PAPER EMPLOYMENT SUPPORT 9