Employer attitudes towards hiring university-educated refugees: evidence from Rwanda

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the labour market conditions of refugees in Rwanda using a process evaluation and a survey with 244 employers. The process evaluation covers a tertiary education program, which offers a path to bachelor’s degree from a US University using a blended approach to instruction. Students highlighted the importance of the internship and employment components of this programme. Survey vignettes indicated that employers reported a 6% lower likelihood of hiring relatively well-educated refugees than to hire Rwandans with otherwise identical characteristics. This finding was driven by the 50% of the employers who found it more complex to hire refugees.

KEYWORDS:

• Higher education
• Labor market
• Rwanda
• Vignettes
• Refugees

Acknowledgements

We recognize the contributions of many organizations, without which it would not have been possible to complete this study. Our thanks go to the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development, the United Nations Children’s Fund, and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees for the opportunity to carry out this study, and for their financial and technical support. We also acknowledge the inputs of Nina Weaver and Ashley Haywood of Kepler, Christina Russell of Southern New Hampshire University, Thomas Wells Dreesen and Juan Pablo Giraldo of UNICEF, and Clara van Praag of UNHCR whose inputs guided the direction of this study. Our acknowledgements would be incomplete without mentioning our team of very able enumerators of Laterite in Rwanda.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Please note, however, that the impact evaluation did not specifically focus on the refugee students targeted by Kepler.

2. The evaluation summary of the Kepler program and a meta-evaluation of five innovations in education provide more information about the other research findings (de Hoop et al. 2019a, 2019b).

3. We recognise that many different contextual characteristics may differ, which may complicate the interpretation of the vignettes. However, we did not want to make the vignettes too complex, and the vignettes seemed to work well during a pilot survey.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the UNICEF [Contract No. 43208424].