Announcement of Staff Transitions and Reflections on the Refugee Self-Reliance Initiative
A Joint Statement From Dale Buscher and Amy Slaughter
At the genesis of the Refugee Self-Reliance Initiative (RSRI), 63 million people across the globe were forcibly displaced due to conflict and human rights abuses. Today, that number is 117 million and growing.
When we started this work, we recognized that the increasingly protracted nature of displacement and the growing numbers of people displaced necessitated doing things differently – that reliance on long-term care and maintenance programs where refugees are dependent on erratic humanitarian assistance was both undignified and unsustainable. Yet, during that pre-Global Compact on Refugees era, there was no shared objective around creating economic opportunities for refugees nor actively promoting self-reliance. Livelihood programs were often add-ons with little connection to market opportunities or knowledge generated about what was actually being achieved. In response, the Women’s Refugee Commission and RefugePoint began convening a Community of Practice with like-minded stakeholders to advance policies and programs in support of self-reliance opportunities and to create a measurement tool to gauge and amplify impact.
Building on prior tools developed by each of our agencies and enlisting the expertise of dozens of leaders in the field, our first undertaking was creating the Self-Reliance Index (SRI) to measure refugee households’ progress towards self-reliance over time. We knew the Index had to be simple, easy to administer, and only focused on the most vital information that would tell us most of what we needed to know to capture program impacts. We knew that it wasn’t just about jobs and income but also about how that income was used to support the well-being of household members. That is, if Mom or Dad were working, were the children more likely to be in school? Were household members more likely to be accessing needed health care and eating three meals a day?
As we both undergo career transitions—Dale is retiring, and Amy is shifting into independent consulting—we’d like to pause and reflect on how these nascent ideas evolved into the Refugee Self-Reliance Initiative and where the RSRI is today.
The two of us, along with Kellie Leeson, spent hours over many days and months wracking our brains around how to come up with ways to easily measure those things our collaborators deemed important. How do you determine if someone’s shelter is ‘appropriate’? If you’re trying to measure employment, what does it mean if someone works only part-time, seasonally, or on a sporadic, irregular basis? When we finally landed on a version we felt somewhat comfortable with, we piloted the SRI in three countries and worked with academic partners to undertake validity and reliability testing. The resultant learning led to modifications to the Index, with version 2.0 launching almost exactly four years ago.
In the intervening years, a lot has happened. We offered training on use of the Index, which led to the creation of online, e-learning modules available in four languages. We started a research learning group to pull together a research agenda and partners engaged in monitoring, testing, and evaluation. We created a steering committee and hired the RSRI’s first Executive Director, Kari Diener, who brought a strong vision for policy and practice reform and introduced elements of market systems development, climate action, and building capacity with refugee-led organizations.
We have been overwhelmed and surprised by the response to these efforts.
Today, 65 partners are using the SRI to measure the impacts of their programs in 31 countries.
450+ individuals have joined the RSRI Community of Practice with 40+ member organizations regularly participating in our bi-monthly calls.
We have collected data on over 30,000 households and have reached a collective 2 million refugees with social and economic inclusion programs through our partners.
Donors have recommended the use of the SRI with their grantees.
The SRI is being used in a variety of refugee and non-refugee contexts – with urban and camp-based refugees, IDPs, returnees, and host community members – in low, medium, and high-income countries.
We are currently undertaking our first-ever rigorous evaluations utilizing the SRI.
We are currently building an interactive, public dashboard that will display progress across SRI domains by country and globally.
With regular reports about cuts in food rations and reductions in humanitarian aid, promoting safe, sustainable livelihoods and assisting refugees to achieve self-reliance is more important than ever. We don’t want refugees to be dependent on inadequate assistance, but we also don’t want them cut off from humanitarian aid before they can sustainably meet their own needs, and we caution against appropriating the language of “self-reliance” in support of the latter. SRI data can be a key part of assessing when we can responsibly disengage households from assistance and ensure that refugees are not prematurely removed from humanitarian aid rolls. Good programming that captures progress on self-reliance can inform us about when the right time to re-channel assistance to those most in need is. In the coming years, we look forward to seeing additional progress in using data to identify what works best to facilitate self-reliance for refugees in various contexts and scaling those approaches broadly.
It’s been an amazing trajectory and a wonderful journey. We wish to thank all of the staff, consultants, advisors, funders, and RSRI stakeholders for moving this agenda forward. It has been a pleasure to work with and learn from you all. We hope this initiative continues to change responses to displacement, restore dignity, choice, and opportunity, and most importantly, help refugees rebuild their lives.
Dale Buscher is the Vice President for Programs at the Women’s Refugee Commission. He is a co-founder of the Refugee Self-Reliance Initiative and the former chair of the RSRI Steering Committee.
Amy Slaughter is the Chief Strategy Officer at RefugePoint. She is a co-founder of the Refugee Self-Reliance Initiative and a technical advisor to the RSRI.
