displaced populations. The medical and economic literature is sufficiently rich to call for urgent action targeted towards the critical periods in early life (the first 1000 days, augmented by the gestation period _in utero_ , see Almond and Currie 2011; Alderman et al. 2014, Black et al. 2014, and Buhta et al. 2014). Ruel and Alderman (2013) suggest that nutrition‐sensitive programs that combine early child development (e.g. maternal and child nutrition intervention, psychological stimulation and responsive parenting) and nutrition interventions could lead to substantial gains in cost, efficiency, and effectiveness. But long‐term impact evaluation studies of such interventions in a refugee setting are lacking. In particular, refugee camps may involve important delivery challenges<sup>7</sup> but also opportunities in terms of cost effectiveness (delivery to a dense population with entry registration and a centralized administration in place). Refugee protection often understood from a legal perspective should also incorporate evidence‐based options to enhance the resilience of refugees.

The report also underlines the agency of refugees towards improving their livelihoods. Refugees are not passive agents, exclusively dependent on external interventions. Local markets and trading activities play an essential role in reducing poverty among refugees in Sub‐Saharan Africa. Similarly, markets constitute an essential driver of the expected impact on the hosting population. Though important, the usual focus on legal protection, health, environmental and security issues is too limited. Understanding protracted refugee situation requires paying much more attention to the interactions between refugees and their hosts. The economic functions endorsed by refugees (labor substitutable to who? Net buyer or net seller of what? Skill and monetary transfers from and to where?), the ability to adopt coping strategies among the hosts (assets, occupation, ...) and the transformative presence of the humanitarian sector seem also to explain to a large extent why positive and negative impacts are not evenly distributed among the hosting population.

A transition from relief to development calls for strengthening the asset‐based capacity and the human capital endowments of the local hosts and in particular among the poor. In that respect, the provision of local public goods seems to be key. While road infrastructure has been found to be a catalyst for local economic development, integrating education and health services provided to refugees and local communities should have promising potential.

The challenges for the local hosts in protracted refugee situations in Sub‐Saharan Africa are intrinsically related to the conditions faced by returnees. Repatriation and local integration are indeed part of the same conundrum. Together with resettlement, they indeed constitute two of the solutions to protracted refugee situations proposed by UNHCR. Voluntary repatriation has often been favored by the international community and host governments since the 1990s. UNHCR has been therefore pro‐active in providing repatriation assistance as well as employment opportunities to returnees. Well, the costs of ensuring favorable conditions for repatriation have often been underestimated, since returnees had sometimes faced unsafe and unfavorable situations, for instance, when previously occupied land had been taken over by others. Inversely, local integration has often been neglected as a possible solution. Beyond the political sensitivity of that option for the host country, the reasons may be related to the

> 7 As stressed by Crisp (2003), Section 2 recalls that protracted refugee situation are usually located in peripheral areas, with poor security, unfavorable climatic conditions, and economically and politically marginalization.

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