# 1. Introduction

Today, more than 36 million refugees are displaced worldwide (UNHCR 2024a). Of these, an estimated 67 percent possess full legal rights to labor market participation, though in practice, only 45 percent are estimated to have unrestricted access (UNHCR 2023). With many refugees facing restrictions to their freedom of movement and right to work, dependency on humanitarian aid is commonplace among refugees, inhibiting their self-reliance. With durable solutions remaining elusive, the long-standing default model of refugee assistance – one that supplants socio-economic rights with external assistance – is increasingly being seen as outdated and unsustainable, with support rapidly moving away from the traditional approach to refugee assistance, to more sustainable and progressive programs and policies that actively seek to promote self-reliance (Betts 2021).

While traditional, ‘care and maintenance’ forms of humanitarian assistance, such as the provision of food and shelter, are often critical at the onset of refugee crises, they become increasingly problematic when they are sustained over the longer term. As emergency phases subside, there is increasing recognition that traditional types of humanitarian aid should play a more limited role in refugees’ lives, with support instead directed towards job creation and building the economic capacities of refugees (Easton-Calabria and Omata 2018). The international discourse has consequently shifted its focus away from long-term, humanitarian models of assistance towards the promotion of refugee self-reliance (Betts 2021) and sustainable programming (UNHCR 2024b). Yet despite this consensus, there remains a clear lack of understanding around what constitutes self-reliance, and by extension, how to measure it.

Without measurement, it is not only difficult to understand whether the promotion of self-reliance has been successful, but almost impossible to nurture the systemic learning required to achieve refugee selfreliance in the long-term. To date, only a handful of approaches have been proposed to measure refugee self-reliance, each of which comes with its own limitations. These measures are either at odds with the concept of self-reliance – in that refugees who do depend on humanitarian assistance can be considered self-reliant – or where a proposed measure is consistent, the data required to measure it is not (yet) available (e.g. the measure proposed by Hoogeveen and Hopper, 2024).

In this paper, the aim is to measure self-reliance using a simple one-dimensional indicator: income. Here, a refugee is considered self-reliant if their self-earned income exceeds the poverty line relevant to their context. It is thus not sufficient for refugees to survive on humanitarian assistance; self-reliance instead requires that refugees have the ability to be independent of assistance and generate the income necessary to attain a – locally relevant – acceptable minimum standard of living.

This approach has several advantages. Practically, it anchors refugee self-reliance within existing poverty measurement, including the monitoring of SDG1.1 (elimination of extreme poverty). Empirically, it allows one to explore the determinants of refugee self-reliance through a quantifiable and widely understood metric: income generation. Theoretically, it offers an appropriate measure with which to conceptualize refugee needs, capturing both income and, at least partially, non-income factors in its measurement, as this paper will demonstrate, using estimates of self-reliance drawn from 11 consumption surveys, which present the universe of data that can be used for such purposes. As far as we can tell, this paper is the first to present a set of global descriptives on refugee self-reliance.

The remainder of the paper is organized as follows. The next section reviews the literature on, and current measurements of, self-reliance. Section 3 outlines the paper’s proposed measure self-reliance and 2