The Government of Chad subscribes to this logic as evidenced by the application decree of Chad’s Asylum Law signed in 2023,<sup>1</sup> and the National Response Plan to the Impact of the Sudanese Crisis which is under preparation. The Law and the Plan promote the local integration of refugees, aim to avoid settling refugees in permanent camps and promote self-sufficiency. They offer refugees the right to own land, to engage in formal employment and commercial activities, to move freely, and to access to banking services. While participation is the stated policy objective, the reality is that previous arrivals are almost exclusively living in camps, and that the new arrivals live in <mark>“organized sites” (as humanitarians now call them), presumably to cope with massive arrivals but with little concrete evidence for the onward movement of refugees.</mark> This note explores the size of this four-way benefit (for refugees, hosts, the Chadian state and the international community) by estimating how much could be saved on aid for basic needs consumption by enabling refugees from Sudan to realize their economic potential.

For its empirical work the note draws primary on data from the ECOSIT4 survey.<sup>2</sup> In 2018–19, Chad became one of the first countries in Africa to capture refugees and host communities in its national household survey. The Refugees and Host Communities Household Survey expanded the national Household Consumption and Informal Sector Survey to include a representative sample of refugees and host communities, including Sudanese and host communities located in the east of the country.

The remainder of this note is organized as follows. Section 2 presents a short discussion of the literature on the economic participation of refugees. Section 3 compares the characteristics of newly arrived refugees from Sudan with previous arrivals for whom survey data is available, to find that both groups are highly comparable. Section 4 uses the existing data to explore how the basic needs refugees are covered from own-income. Sections 5 and 6 dig deeper by exploring econometrically the correlates of higher incomes of refugees. A discussion of the results and their policy implications follows in section 7, after which section 8 concludes.

# 2. Benefits of economic participation of refugees

Whether or not the arrival of Sudanese refugees in Chad contributes to economic growth is of limited immediate relevance as concerns about the safety of fellow humans drive the response. Nor does any decision maker suggest that hosting refugees is a development strategy Chad should pursue. But, given the presence of thousands of refugees in the country, the constrained fiscal space the authorities face, and the likelihood that international assistance for refugees will taper in the future, an imminent policy question is how to ensure that refugees can be hosted in a sustainable manner, without becoming a fiscal burden in the future.

The fear that refugees are (or might become) a fiscal burden is driven by a broadly held perspective about forcibly displaced persons in general, and refugees in particular, namely that they are humanitarian subjects, vulnerable and worthy of public assistance (Betts and Collier 2017). This perspective is not universal, however. <mark>The economic contributions of refugees have been extolled for years, from posters</mark>

> 1 https://www.ecoi.net/en/file/local/2091861/645b938a4.pdf.

> 2 Enquête sur la Consommation des ménages et le Secteur Informel au Tchad. The survey was carried out jointly with the National Statistics Office (Institut national de la statistique, des études économiques et démographiques, INSEED) and the UNHCR in Chad.

3