The Welfare of Syrian Refugees (ePub)

The Syrian refugee crisis, which began in 2011, is one of the most pressing disastersin the world today, with its effects reverberating around the globe. By the end of2015, more than 7.6 million of the country's people had been internally displacedand 4.3 million were registered refugees. The number of internally displaced personsand refugees amounts to about half of Syria's precrisis population. Thousands havedied while trying to reach safety.Due to the large humanitarian response, there is now a wealth of availableinformation on refugees' income and expenses, food and nutrition, health, education,employment, vulnerability, housing, and other measures of well-being. These datahave been little explored, as humanitarian organizations face daily challenges thatmake the full use of existing data very difficult.The Welfare of Syrian Refugees: Evidence from Jordan and Lebanon aims to assessthe poverty and vulnerability of these refugees and evaluate existing and alternativepolicies designed to help them. The authors find that current policies, including cashtransfers and food vouchers, are effective in reducing poverty, but fail to lead to—nor are they designed to yield—economic inclusion and self-reliance. Those goalswould require a different humanitarian and development paradigm, one that focuseson growth policies for areas affected by refugees where the target population has amix of refugees and hosting populations.This volume is the result of the first comprehensive collaboration between the WorldBank Group and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) andaims to better understand and ultimately improve the well-being of Syrian refugeesliving in Jordan and Lebanon.