What is Fresh FINDings?

Fresh FINDings is a newsletter that brings you early insights from the ongoing research with refugees in Jordan and Kenya, exploring their financial and economic lives. The newsletter also highlights policy initiatives related to the financial inclusion of refugees and migrants more broadly, as well as news from pilot programs aiming to improve the financial lives of this population.

Fresh FINDings is an output of Finance in Displacement (FIND), a project to understand and strengthen the financial lives of refugees and migrants in Jordan, Kenya, Uganda, Mexico, and Ethiopia. The project seeks to understand how refugees and migrants manage their financial and economic lives in the context of protracted displacement, their financial challenges, and strategies or resources they can use to overcome the same.

In Jordan and Kenya, the project is facilitated by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), in partnership with Catholic University (KU) Eichstätt-Ingolstadt, The Fletcher School of Tufts University, and International Rescue Committee (IRC).

In Jordan, we completed three rounds of intensive interviews, covering 89 participants in urban and semi-urban areas of Jordan between September 2019 and December 2021. Half of our sample were Syrian refugees, and distinct from other studies, the other half included refugees from Iraq, Yemen, Sudan, and Somalia.

In Nairobi, Kenya, we also completed three rounds of interviews, covering 80 urban refugees from South Sudan, Somalia, Ethiopia, DRC, and Burundi. We also documented thirty community-based financial biographies.

The studies in Uganda, Mexico, and Ethiopia were conducted in 2019. This research was funded by the Open Society Foundations in partnership with The Fletcher School of Tufts University and IRC. Additionally, pilot programs based on the research findings are ongoing in Uganda. For more information on the findings of these earlier studies, please visit the Journeys Project.

Why subscribe?

It is critical to our approach that we engage with key stakeholders and service providers, in Jordan, Kenya, and globally, in making sense of the implications of these insights for their own work. Fresh FINDings is meant to open that communication channel.

Every month, we will bring you some interesting and important stories that we heard in the field from our respondents. Some of these stories you might already know, but hopefully we can elucidate a different perspective. Coming from a practitioner background ourselves, we understand how sometimes even the simplest and obvious are overlooked, as we are so engaged in day to day implementation. Hopefully, we can help you step out and look at the lives of the refugees from a different perspective.

What we hope to receive from you?

We are hoping for Fresh FINDings to be a conversation starter. So please write back with your questions, suggestions, or critique.

You can leave a comment in the article or send us an email at Swati.Dhawan@ku.de or Julie.Zollmann@tufts.edu.

And do not forget to subscribe!

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Insights from research exploring financial lives of displaced populations

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