Seminar Summary — “Give Us Work”: The Psychosocial Value of Employment for Rohingya Refugees

The Rohingya Muslims of Myanmar have been described by United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres as “one of, if not the, most discriminated people in the world.” Since 2017, more than 750,000 Rohingya have fled Buddhist-majority Myanmar as refugees due to systematic persecution and targeted violence at the hands of Myanmar’s government, which refuses to recognize the Rohingya as citizens. The denial of citizenship rights makes the Rohingya one of the largest stateless populations in the world.

Many Rohingya refugees have settled in crowded refugee camps in neighboring Bangladesh, which the government of Myanmar claims they illegally immigrated from during British colonial rule (in actuality, the Rohingya have roots in Myanmar dating back to the 12th century). The largest of the refugee camps in Bangladesh is the Kutupalong-Balukhali Expansion Site, which is home to more than 635,000 Rohingya — the majority of the population that fled the most recent wave of violence.

Aid to refugees often focuses on providing necessities such as food, water and shelter. However, interviews with refugees reveal that these basic items, while crucial, do not remedy the monotony and boredom of life in camps. A Syrian refugee residing in the Kilis Öncüpınar Accommodation Facility in Turkey told The New York Times in 2014, “There is no purpose in a life like this. One day is like another.”

For the Rohingya in Bangladesh, formal employment is prohibited, informal employment is limited and mobility is restricted, meaning there are few opportunities to make money and occupy free time. At the same time, previous literature indicates that employment could help mitigate the abject hopelessness and uncertainty many refugees face when displaced from their homes.

Motivated to better understand the potential link between employment and psychological well-being, Reshmaan Hussam, Assistant Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, and a team of researchers surveyed male and female refugees between the ages of 18 and 45 years old in the Kutupalong camp. Eleven percent reported having worked in the previous month, with the average duration of employment being three days. Individuals in the sample reported filling their time by taking naps or sitting idle. Furthermore, qualitative interviews revealed a common desire among the refugees for “haather kaaj,” a colloquial term for handiwork.

In the second event of the Human Capital Initiative Fall 2022 Seminar Series on October 12, Hussam presented her research team’s new study investigating whether employment confers significant psychosocial benefits beyond the impacts of cash alone. They designed a field experiment in which 745 Kutupalong camp residents of working age were randomly assigned to one of three different treatment arms: in the employment arm, they offered gainful employment in the form of a surveying assignment for an average of three days per week for two months; the control arm received no work and a nominal fee for weekly survey participation; and a third cash arm, which was included to estimate the non-pecuniary psychosocial value of employment, received no work, but a large fee (equivalent to that received by those in the employment arm) for weekly survey participation.

In designing the employment arm’s survey assignment, Hussam and colleagues sought to replicate existing forms of employment in the camps offered through other nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and incorporate features that sociological literature has identified as beneficial for employees including the occupation of potentially idle time, active engagement, sociability and purpose. The assignment involved a data collection exercise in which participants filled out time-use sheets, reporting on how their neighbors were spending their time throughout the day. The data collection was able to be easily completed by both men and women of any literacy level and age. Hussam and colleagues told participants in the employment arm that the objective of the assignment was to help NGOs understand the refugee experience to provide better services.

After administering the three study treatments for two months, Hussam and colleagues found:

work leads to substantial improvements in psychosocial well-being;
cash has limited psychosocial impact;
the majority of those offered work are willing to forgo cash payments equivalent to baseline savings levels in order to continue working without pay and;
differential effects of work are concentrated among males.

In terms of the improvements to psychosocial well-being, at the beginning of the study, approximately 40 percent of participants qualified as moderately depressed according to the diagnostic tool the researchers used to assess likelihood of depression. Furthermore, almost 50 percent reported recent suicidal ideation. After the study was administered, individuals in the employment arm were 12 percent less likely to be depressed, and reported feeling more stable and secure. They were also significantly less likely to feel physically ill, less stressed, more sociable, more likely to perform better on simple memory and math tests and less risk averse.

Hussam and colleagues were able to link these effects to the psychosocial value of work since individuals in the cash-only arm of the study did not experience the same magnitude of improvements. Additionally, when Hussam and colleagues offered individuals in the employment arm the opportunity to continue working for an additional week but with no pay, 69 percent were willing to do so. Taken together, these two findings suggest that for individuals in precarious situations with a seemingly high demand for cash, employment holds value beyond money alone.

Notably, the psychosocial value of employment the researchers observed was driven by men. Men in the employment arm exhibited large psychosocial improvements, while those in the cash arm experienced an insignificant effect. In contrast, while women also benefited from employment, they benefited nearly as much from cash alone. Because most Rohingya follow patriarchal norms, Hussam and colleagues attribute the near-equal benefits of cash and employment for women to the fact that cash, with or without employment, significantly raises women’s beliefs about their prerogative to make decisions in the household.

Hussam and colleagues caution against generalizing their findings to other settings, given that their study engages a migrant population that has experienced horrific levels of violence not seen by many others. However, the context they explore of limited labor market opportunities paired with material poverty and a limited set of alternative leisure activities is commonly encountered by forcibly displaced migrants, the incarcerated and rural poor globally. Furthermore, their finding that most refugees participating in the study were willing to work for free may be taken into consideration when policymakers are deciding whether to tackle poverty through cash transfers or employment programs. Ultimately, the results have implications for social protection policies for disadvantaged populations around the world.

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