A Refugee Work Pact in Ethiopia Raises the Stakes for Real Jobs

The ILO and UNHCR have signed an agreement to deepen cooperation on skills, employment and livelihoods for refugees and host communities in Ethiopia. The agreement builds on existing projects, but its significance will depend on whether training and policy commitments lead to sustained access to work and local markets.

The International Labour Organization (ILO) and UNHCR have agreed to deepen their cooperation on work and livelihoods for refugees and host communities in Ethiopia. Their new understanding covers skills, market access, digital inclusion and labour rights.

The Supplementary Understanding brings together two kinds of expertise. UNHCR works with refugees through its protection mandate and operations, while the ILO focuses on labour markets, skills, enterprises and working conditions. Their closer cooperation reflects a practical challenge: access to training alone cannot ensure that someone can find customers, enter employment or make a business viable. Those outcomes also depend on the opportunities and institutions around them.

Ethiopia is pursuing refugee inclusion through its Makatet Roadmap, a five-year national framework for managing its refugee population. The agreement places employment and livelihoods within that wider policy effort. Turning a national commitment into a local opportunity, however, involves more than setting objectives. Government bodies, employers, workers' organizations and communities all have roles in determining which services people can use and what routes into work are open to them.

The inclusion of host communities is central to the agencies' approach. Refugees and local residents may both need skills, services and ways to earn a living, even though their circumstances differ. So, programmes designed for both groups need to show how each benefits.

The existing projects show the scale of the task

The agreement builds on PROSPECTS, a Netherlands-funded partnership launched in 2019 that brings together the ILO, UNHCR, UNICEF, the International Finance Corporation and the World Bank. Its aim is to improve access to education, social protection and decent work for forcibly displaced people and host communities. In Ethiopia, ILO and UNHCR have already used that platform to work across several areas of economic inclusion.

Their joint activities include entrepreneurship training, financial education and a satellite technical and vocational education and training centre in Kebribeyah. The centre has expanded access to accredited, market-relevant training. Accreditation gives participants a recognized form of training; the next question is what they can do with it. The agencies' renewed focus on markets points toward that next step: connecting skills and enterprises to opportunities that can support an income.

Other initiatives address conditions beyond the workplace. The agencies have conducted a feasibility study on including refugees in Ethiopia's Community-Based Health Insurance scheme and established a technical working group to support health inclusion. They have also developed a roadmap for Kebribeyah that seeks to transform the refugee camp into an integrated, climate-resilient urban settlement. These are distinct initiatives, and their progress cannot be captured by a single measure of employment.

The agencies report that their joint interventions have reached more than 524,000 refugees and host community members with socioeconomic services since PROSPECTS began in Ethiopia.

Decent work requires more than a place on a course

The new understanding explicitly includes labour rights alongside skills and livelihoods. The combination recognizes two separate questions: whether people can get work, and what kind of work they can get. An increase in training places may be useful, but it cannot by itself show whether graduates enter employment, earn reliably or work under decent conditions. The agreement creates an opportunity to examine those results together.

The proposed focus on digital inclusion and access to markets could also affect how participants seek work or reach customers. The agreement does not spell out specific targets for either area, so its practical direction remains to be seen. Future reporting could clarify which barriers the partners choose to address, who uses the resulting services and whether those services help people sustain economic activity beyond the life of a programme.

Young people from refugee and host communities already have a role through the jointly supported Youth Network Committee. They contribute to the design and implementation of development initiatives affecting their futures. Their participation may help the agencies identify priorities that programme designers might otherwise miss. A fuller assessment would also show which ideas were put into practice and whether young participants saw improvements in training, employment or livelihoods.

What would count as progress

The two agencies plan to work more closely with Ethiopia's government, employers' and workers' organizations, development partners, businesses and communities. Those relationships are where the agreement will acquire practical meaning. Employers can help identify skills they need; workers' organizations bring attention to conditions at work; public institutions influence how inclusion commitments are carried out.

The next useful evidence would follow people beyond the point at which they receive a service. Training completion, entry into work, business activity and changes in income would show more than enrolment totals alone. Reporting results for refugees and host community members separately would make it possible to see whether opportunities are reaching both groups. Updates on the health insurance work and Kebribeyah roadmap would clarify how those wider initiatives are progressing.

ILO and UNHCR have established projects on which to build and a shared agenda for their next phase. The unresolved question is how far that agenda can carry people from access to a programme toward economic security. Ethiopia's refugee inclusion commitments will become more tangible when the partners can show what happens after training ends, which opportunities open in local markets and whether the work people obtain meets the standards the agreement promotes.