Step Up: How to Get Refugees Into Work Quickly

Getting refugees promptly into work is a top priority because it fast-tracks their integration, or their ability to participate in society fully. However, refugees face all sorts of hurdles to finding work – such as personal trauma, social discrimination and government bureaucracy. 

How To Get Refugees Into Work Quickly outlines sixteen recommendations for governments, NGOs, and businesses to facilitate refugee employment and highlights best practices and promising new approaches. The study explores how to pair asylum seekers with non-frivolous claims to work immediately, and demonstrates that while recruiting refugees may involve additional costs, this investment tends to yield a return quickly. The report also makes the case that it may not only be humane to create a speedy and fair asylum process, but cost-efficient. 

This study was co-published by the Tent Partnership for Refugees and the Open Political Economy Network, an international platform for progress whose mission is to break down barriers: between countries and within them; that privilege some and deny opportunities to others; and that entrench established ways of doing things at the expense of new, different and better ones.