Financial Inclusion and Digital Connectivity in Refugee Governance

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The project examines emerging trends in refugee governance: debit cards for cash assistance and digital connectivity initiatives. We analyse uptake and challenges of these technologies in four countries: Greece, Jordan, Lebanon and the UK. We include these countries because each has innovated solutions to refugee governance and integration, but in different ways with different outcomes. Our project includes surveys of organisations working in this field and in-depth case studies with humanitarian and refugee-led initiatives. Working across four countries, we are uniquely able to identify both local and global trends in techno-humanitarianism. Working with refugee-led organisations, the project will generate alternative models of financial inclusion and digital connectivity and work with international stakeholders to overcome exclusion.As the first transnational study of connectivity and debit cards for refugees, this research produces a timely and rigorous intervention in the context of refugee governance, where enduring refugees' forced displacement and destitution are matched by rapidly changing and often experimental governmental approaches using digital technologies. Our study of connectivity and debit cards for refugees maps their operation, effects, and long-term impact. Our study improves the understanding of these digital solutions offered to refugees beyond the promotional or anecdotal slogans that reduce complex processes to either 'innovations' that speed and individualize aid, or 'traps' that disguise surveillance under service provision.The research includes intensive fieldwork and participatory research in four countries, an innovative approach that addresses gaps in migration and refugee governance research. In Phase 1, we will survey organisations employing debit card and digital connectivity initiatives. In Phase 2, the research team will interview key stakeholders, experts and policy-makers to better understand the aims and challenges of these initiatives. We will also perform scoping workshops to plan participatory research with refugee-led initiatives. In Phase 3, PDRAs perform in-depth case studies of debit card and digital connectivity initiatives in Greece, Jordan, Lebanon and the UK to better understand how local context affects implementation. In Phase 4, PI/CIs co-produce research with refugee-led financial inclusion and digital connectivity initiatives. In Phase 5, we focus on data analysis and communicating our findings. Our Durham-based PDRA will be tasked with framing our findings for non-academic audiences and building relationships through which to communicate transformative approaches to cash assistance, financial inclusion and digital connectivity.Our research design and relationship-building will allow us to: 1. understand both common and diverse digital connectivity and debit card practices for refugees in Greece, Jordan, Lebanon and the UK,2. compare and conceptualise how financial inclusion and debit card practices changes relationships between refugees, host communities, NGOs, state agencies in and across our research sites,3. work with refugee-led initiatives to develop innovative models of financial inclusion and digital connectivity and to share them with key stakeholders, and4. contribute cutting-edge empirical research to conceptual debates on finance-security assemblages, techno-humanitarianism and refugee digitality.