Kondylis (2008) evaluated the policy of Imidugudu in Rwanda by which returnee households where housed in new villages where they received land and inputs. Her results show that for the group of returnees that moved into imidugudu, who received more land than they would have otherwise, the program had a positive asset effect on their agricultural production. Nevertheless, this group experienced lower returns to inputs than the group of returnees who were not in the imidugudu program. She suggests that the episode of displacement may have lowered the returnees' level of know‐ how, but also that the imidugudu policy did not allow for transfer of skills between stayers and returnees, probably due to remaining ethnic and political tensions.

This resonates with the Burundi case where the land constraint is also causing a lot of tensions between returnees and stayers. The question whether or not the welfare of formerly displaced will improve after their return to the home country is entirely empirical and can only be answered on a case‐by‐case basis. It is worth nothing that panel data on (former) refugees before, during and after displacement is lacking, due to the difficulty of tracking displaced and formerly displaced households. What is clear from the Verwimp & Munoz‐Mora study is that the plight of (former) refugees does not end upon return. Once returned they face the political and economic legacy of the home country, including (in the case of Burundi) land scarcity and land disputes.

Liz Alden Wily (2009) in that respect argues that post‐conflict economies should seize the opportunity to reform the land tenure system, rather than attempting to restitute the land to previous owners. Not only were land disputes often one of the underlying issues causing the broader conflict, but mismanagement of land in the post‐conflict setting may sow the seed for renewed conflict, at least at the local level, if not nationwide. This is of course highly correlated with the agrarian nature of countries involved in conflict in Sub‐Saharan Africa. This again calls for a robust evaluation study of land reforms in post‐conflict economies, in particular in cases with a large population of returnees.

# **6. Conclusions**

It has become common in the development policy debate to call for better linking humanitarian activities to development actions. That is not new, but, in a policy debate, one needs to specify how to do that. This paper leads to some specific conclusions that constitute calls for further research or concrete action.

Over the last two decades, the share of refugees from Sub‐Saharan Africa has remained relatively stable but most changes have occurred within Africa. While positive trends have recently been observed in Southern and Western Africa, the recent surge in refugees originating from Eastern Africa is a worrying development. These refugees appear to be particularly vulnerable to shocks in complex emergencies, having to face the unfortunate experiences of both recurrent insecurity and weather shocks. Seeking to enhance resilience to climate‐induced conflict in the Horn of Africa should constitute a first priority that goes far beyond the issue of refugee protection. Calderone et al. (2014) provide some policy options.

The vulnerability of refugees in Sub‐Saharan Africa is exacerbated by the dominance of protracted and organized refugee situations, together with larger shares of young children and women among the 30