Underlining The Scope Of Employment For Refugees At The World Economic Forum 2023

According to the New Humanitarian Report, last year, 100 million people were forcibly displaced from their homes. Refugees can be better integrated into societies when there is a scope of employment for them. As the number of refugees has gone up, there is a need to come up with better solutions for creating more jobs for the refugees. There is a need for legal and timely access to local label markets; a need to reduce reliance on language fluency and to prioritise skills first; a need to create visibility of vacancies and proactively support job matching; and finally, a need to look more broadly than just employment at wider social cohesion and integration.

Being A Refugee

Ahmed Judeh says, "The first human right is to have a nationality, to belong. There is a complexity to belonging for refugees. Like we are pushed away everywhere. But now we are having, for example, the crisis with the Ukrainian refugees, which tells the world that not only Middle Easterners can be refugees but also people from whatever other country, which means would you please treat everyone the same? Hopefully not, but maybe you are next. So would we please treat each other as we would like to be treated?"

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Ahmed said he has found a home in the Netherlands because he is appreciated as an artist, as a person, and as a citizen. Talking about his profession as a ballet dancer, he said, "Ballet is, as I said, a very demanding career that is based on the body. Your instrument is your body. No one can take it from you. If you are a refugee or a citizen, or whatever nationality you have, no one can take your body from you."

Government Opening Up Labour Market

Zena Toukkan, Minister of Planning and International Cooperation of Jordan, talking about Syrian refugees in Jordan, said that 30% of the Jordanian population is a refugee and has refugee status either registered with the UNHCR or with the UNRWA. 11% are Syrian refugees. And it has been; we've been basically living this refugee crisis for almost a decade now. And we began to change our policies over time."

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She continued, "It started as a humanitarian effort where you needed to provide refugees with the basic needs, mainly food and shelter. We transitioned into a more resilience-based approach. And we started developing what is known as the "Jordan Response Plan. In the sense that it's no longer a humanitarian crisis, but it's becoming more of a development crisis."

Constraints On Governments

Opening up the labour market isn't easy because of the economic challenges that Jordan is facing and because of the crisis in the region, the series of crises that are mostly exogenous shocks from the financial crisis to the Arab Spring to the Syrian crisis and now into the pandemic and the most recent to the Russia-Ukraine crisis. All of these had an impact on the Jordanian economy. They have opened a number of economic sectors by providing free of charge work permits and flexible employment, which allows them to change jobs easily.

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The unemployment rate in Jordan has increased with the Syrian crisis from around 13%. Currently, there is a 23% unemployment rate, with youth unemployment at 45% high. There have been reports from FAFO that for every one formal Syrian or male worker, there are two that are working informally. For governments, it is difficult to make changes at the policy level for refugees vs. citizens. Often, the legal barriers to employment are used as the reason why the law doesn't allow it. But there are actually many instances in which the legal framework is open enough to refugees.