Video: Graduation Programme in Maratane

Informed by the scientific evidence that the Graduation Programme can improve livelihoods, UNHCR, the World Bank, and a coalition of NGOs formed the Poverty Alleviation Coalition as part of work on the Global Refugee Forum 2019 to expand programmes using the Graduation Approach for refugees and host communities. The current target is to reach 160,000 households in 26 countries by the end of 2023. As part of that effort, funded by the U.S. Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration (BPRM), UNHCR implemented the Graduation Programme for refugees and hosts in and around the Maratane refugee settlement in Northern Mozambique. The programme was implemented from September 2019 to December 2021. To assess the graduation programme’s impact, economists at UNHCR and the London School of Economics (LSE) oversaw an impact evaluation — the first evaluation of its kind in refugee settings— with 460 refugees and host community members.

The findings suggest that investing humanitarian resources in graduation programmes that include ultra-poor refugee and host community members may be an important strategy to achieve the twin goals of improving financial security and promoting social cohesion, and thus pave the way for the integration of refugees into environments defined by significant scarcity of resources.