Executive Summary
The ongoing cost of living crisis is pushing people into poverty globally, with the East Africa region particularly affected by food scarcity and price inflation due to high food import dependency and a severe drought. Among those most affected are vulnerable host communities and displaced populations in urban areas, who are affected by rising cost of services, transport and food. Displaced people in particular are at risk of being deprived of assistance. The International Rescue Committee (IRC) and its partners witnessed their clients in Nairobi and Kampala suffering from the effects of high inflation, rising debt and food insecurity and inability to meet basic needs.
Shock responsive social protection systems are crucial to support vulnerable populations during this economic crisis. However, while access to this support is a human right, urban displaced populations tend to be excluded from national social protection systems. In Kenya and Uganda, national social protection is focused largely on citizens. Ideally, humanitarian assistance in the form of cash transfers would be deployed to fill the gaps of national safety nets, however, so far this kind of support has been insufficient and largely confined to camps or rural settlements. Few donors directly support city authorities and urban communities that host refugees.
These structural gaps were highlighted by the COVID-19 crisis response which was a missed opportunity to meaningfully shift social protection approaches to become more inclusive.
The lack of safety nets to protect refugees and vulnerable host residents from the impact of the crisis undermines achieved or planned development gains. As governments, bilateral and multilateral donors establish a response to support affected populations in East Africa, they should draw lessons from the COVID-19 response and ensure assistance is provided without discrimination based on refugee status or location. While inclusive social protection systems are being set up, immediate multipurpose cash assistance should be scaled for the urban displaced who have been chronically underfunded.
We therefore recommend that
• Humanitarian and development donors rapidly increase funding to scale and ensure inclusion of the urban displaced in humanitarian cash and social protection measures.
• Donors and humanitarian frontline responders should coordinate closely with national and city governments, to support targeting and last mile delivery of social protection services that ensures the inclusion of urban displaced populations.
• Host governments should ensure the urban displaced populations can meet the eligibility criteria of registration processes for social protection.
• Private sector and host governments should remove barriers to access affordable financial and digital services to ensure that humanitarian and social cash transfers are inclusive of and effective for urban refugees.
Source: International Rescue Committee