From “Incentives” to Insecurity: The Broken Economics of Refugee Teaching

A refugee classroom can stay open even when the teacher at the front has no formal contract, no pension and no clear path into the profession. New research shows that refugee education often depends on teachers who perform full professional duties while being paid through temporary "incentive" schemes that keep them outside national payrolls, labour protections and career structures.

Published in Social Sciences, the research by Mary Mendenhall, Kemigisha Richardson, Sarah Etzel, Tiffany Tryon and Whitney Hough of Teachers College, Columbia University examines teacher compensation across forced-displacement settings. Based on three linked studies, a multi-country mixed-methods project, a global donor mapping and a South Sudan case study, the authors find that refugee teachers are frequently excluded from national payrolls and channelled into humanitarian "incentive" systems that offer low or unpredictable pay, limited professional recognition and few employment protections.

The key insight is uncomfortable but important: teacher pay is not merely an operational detail. It is one of the main ways institutions decide who counts as a professional, who belongs inside the education system and who remains treated as temporary labour.

Pay Is Where Refugee Inclusion Breaks Down

Refugee education is usually delivered through hybrid arrangements involving ministries, UN agencies, NGOs, donors and local communities. National authorities may determine curricula, examinations and teacher standards, while international organisations finance schools and recruit staff. These overlapping systems keep education running, but they also blur responsibility for the people doing the work.

The study identifies four broad compensation models: teachers may be integrated into national payrolls, paid through parallel humanitarian systems, supported through hybrid government-donor arrangements or compensated directly by communities. In real settings, these categories often overlap, creating fragmented systems in which teachers performing similar work can receive radically different pay and protections.

This fragmentation shapes teachers' legal status, professional identity and economic security. A teacher on a government payroll may receive a recognised salary, civil-service status and access to benefits. A refugee teacher in the same broader education system may be classified as an "incentive worker," placed on a short-term contract and excluded from formal career structures.

The study describes this as a responsibility gap. Governments, donors and humanitarian agencies all influence refugee education, yet no single actor consistently assumes long-term responsibility for teacher employment, professional recognition or workforce integration.

Refugee situations are rarely short-lived. Schools may operate for years under arrangements originally designed for temporary emergencies. Teachers can remain on one-year, or shorter, contracts for extended periods, facing repeated uncertainty despite performing an essential public service. The result is a system that promotes educational inclusion for refugee children while often denying equivalent professional inclusion to refugee adults who teach them.

"Incentives" Turn Professional Work Into Permanent Temporariness

One of the study's notable findings concerns language. Terms such as "salary," "stipend" and "incentive" may appear administrative, but they carry major legal and financial consequences.

In some host countries, refugees face restrictions on formal employment or work permits. Humanitarian organisations may therefore classify teacher payments as incentives rather than wages, allowing refugees to work without formally entering the labour market. This can help schools operate where legal barriers would otherwise prevent employment, but can also enable institutions to avoid obligations linked to minimum wages, social security, pensions and formal contracts.

What begins as a workaround can become a permanent employment structure. Refugee teachers may teach full classes, follow national curricula and carry the same responsibilities as recognised teachers, while the terminology attached to their pay keeps them outside the formal profession.

The paper argues that this language normalises precarity. By calling compensation an incentive, institutions can frame professional labour as temporary assistance, even when teachers have worked in the same schools for years.

The consequences are visible in the wage disparities documented across the study. In Cameroon, qualified refugee teachers reportedly received $42 a month, compared with $241–300 for national teachers. In Ethiopia, unqualified refugee teachers received $16 against a government rate of $69. In Kenya, refugee teachers earned $55, while national teachers in camps received $153 and the starting salary on the central government payroll stood at $245.

These figures should be interpreted cautiously because they come from different countries and labour systems. Living costs, currencies and benefits vary. Even so, the pattern is clear: legal category and migration status can determine compensation more strongly than classroom responsibility.

South Sudan shows how fragmented systems can also produce contradictory outcomes. Government teachers in the study earned between $3 and $58 a month, while compensation in refugee camps ranged from $40 to $500. Teachers working in the same school could receive different amounts depending on their qualifications, experience and the NGO responsible for payment.

The problem, then, is not simply that refugee teachers are always paid the least. It is that pay systems are unstable, inconsistent and governed by multiple institutions with different rules. This instability makes teaching less of a profession and more of a survival strategy.

Fragmented Funding Creates a Second-Class Workforce

Humanitarian agencies have tried to harmonise teacher pay, but the study shows why coordination remains difficult. Donors often resist financing recurrent costs such as salaries because they view them as the responsibility of national governments. Host governments, meanwhile, may lack the fiscal space to absorb large numbers of teachers working in refugee settlements.

This creates a structural impasse. International organisations fund education but hesitate to make long-term wage commitments. Governments regulate schools but may not finance the workforce. NGOs recruit and pay teachers but remain dependent on short project cycles. When a project ends, payments can be delayed or disappear, particularly when no institution is clearly responsible for the transition.

Even well-intentioned harmonisation can have limits. Uganda consolidated some payments through designated NGOs, while South Sudan's Education Cluster established a standard incentive rate for volunteer and community teachers. Such efforts can reduce variation, but standardising very low wages does not necessarily create decent employment.

The study also links pay insecurity to professional recognition. Refugee teachers may arrive with qualifications from their countries of origin but lack documents, face unclear equivalency systems or encounter host-country rules that prevent them from registering as formal teachers. Some are employed as classroom assistants even when they perform the work of lead teachers.

Training does not always solve the problem. Refugee teachers can complete courses in host countries and still remain excluded from national teaching services because of work restrictions, identity requirements or shifting credential rules. In Kenya and Chad, the study documents how recognition can be blocked by administrative criteria even when teachers have undertaken relevant training.

These barriers create a second-class workforce: teachers are essential enough to be hired, but not recognised enough to receive secure status, equal pay or career progression. Their exclusion also extends to collective representation. The study found that teacher unions in the countries examined rarely represented refugee teachers effectively, while humanitarian organisations often operated outside traditional labour structures. Some teachers reported that raising concerns could lead to transfers or termination.

Without access to unions, grievance mechanisms or stable contracts, refugee teachers have little leverage over the systems that determine their livelihoods. Their flexibility becomes an institutional advantage for underfunded programmes, but a long-term vulnerability for the teachers themselves.

Refugee Education Cannot Be Sustainable on Temporary Labour

Humanitarian agencies deliberately create exploitation, the study asserts. The authors explicitly describe these outcomes as products of a flawed architecture in which governments, donors and aid organisations operate under severe legal, fiscal and political constraints. The problem is structural, which means it cannot be solved by a single agency increasing a stipend or revising a job title. It requires changes across refugee law, education policy, donor financing, credential recognition and public-sector workforce planning.

In the short term, governments and humanitarian actors can make payment systems more transparent, reduce arbitrary differences between agencies and ensure that pay reflects qualifications, responsibilities and inflation. Refugee teachers also need access to professional development and credible routes for recognising prior qualifications.

In the longer term, the research points towards multi-year financing and formal pathways into national education systems. Donors would need to treat teacher compensation not as an undesirable recurrent expense but as an investment in the continuity of education. Host governments would need international support to integrate qualified refugee teachers without carrying the full fiscal burden alone.

Teacher unions and professional bodies should also have a stronger role in salary-setting, credential recognition and dispute resolution. Their inclusion could help move refugee teachers from informal humanitarian arrangements towards recognised labour protection.

The study's multi-country evidence is weighted towards Sub-Saharan Africa, and the authors do not claim universal generalisability. It also does not directly measure how different compensation systems affect student learning. Those limitations point to important next steps: longitudinal research should examine how pay stability influences teacher retention, attendance, classroom quality and educational outcomes.