living in slightly different localities in terms of the local density of forcibly displaced persons and looks for differences in their perceptions regarding service delivery.

Our evidence on perceptions about service provision is limited by data. We find that in both Lebanon and the Amman governorate sample in Jordan, a sizeable share of host community children attends private school (which is arguably unaffordable for many refugee children), and we find no relationship between changes in the perceptions of education quality and local Syrian refugee prevalence. In KRI – where almost all host community children attend public school – residents of districts with a higher local influx of the forcibly displaced are more likely to report that education quality has worsened.

These findings should not be interpreted as evidence of absence of strain on public service systems. Rather, local competition and dissatisfaction among the host community concerning refugees is mitigated by hosts’ use of alternate systems and refugees’ limited usage of facilities and services due to a range of constraints. Across the three territories, enrollment rates of school-age (ages 5-15 years) refugee children are low, ranging from two-thirds in the Jordan sample to slightly more than half in Lebanon. The most prominent reason is not lack of access to public schools but economic hardship, either because children need to work to support the family, or because the expenses associated with going to school are unaffordable. Similarly, out-of-pocket expenditures for nonpreventive health care can be significant, and are associated with risky coping strategies.

The remainder of the paper is structured as follows. Section 2 describes the data and methodology used to measure the impact of the Syrian refugee influx on the delivery of public services and public perceptions. Sections 3, 4, and 5 present the results for infrastructure, health, and education services, respectively. Finally, section 6 concludes.

# **2. Data and Methodology**

This report uses data from 2015-2016 household- and individual-level surveys. The principal data source is the Syrian Refugee and Host Community Surveys (SRHCS), implemented in Jordan, Lebanon, and the Kurdistan region, Iraq. Estimates from nationally representative surveys, where available, are also used to establish baseline or benchmark conditions. The surveys were designed to include detailed information on both displaced and host community households, to allow for within- and across-context comparisons.

There were several challenges associated with conducting a nationally representative survey of the host community population and the forcibly displaced. The first difficulty is the lack of a recent or reliable sample frame, especially for Lebanon, where the last official population census was conducted in 1932. In Jordan and KRI, available sampling frames were also considerably dated.<sup>5</sup> In Lebanon, an additional difficulty was that there was no available cartographic division of the country into geographic areas small enough

> 5 Typically, such a sample frame consists of the universe of enumeration areas in a country, with associated estimates of population. We constructed our own sample frame by selecting a number of Small Area Units (SAUs) and then conducting a full listing operation by visiting every household within the selected SAUs and collecting basic demographic and contact information.

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