The UNHCR’s Graduation Approach for Camp-based Poverty Reduction: Lessons from Zimbabwe’s Tongogara Refugee Camp

The article critiques the graduation approach, a poverty alleviation strategy implemented by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and its partners in low-income refugee-receiving countries. This article reports on a qualitative study conducted in 2020 in Zimbabwe’s Tongogara refugee camp with 47 participants through face-to-face interviews. We apply the lens of Amartya Sen’s development as freedom to demonstrate how multiple unfreedoms in the refugee camps context curtail the sustainability of the graduation approach’s six sequential stages. We find that in Tongogara, restrictions on refugees’ freedom of movement and other institutional limitations undercut the approach’s chance of viability. We conclude that unless structural concessions are made towards enhancing refugees’ agency, camp-based income-generating activities will remain at the subsistence level. We recommend that the six graduation stages be treated as indivisible and cumulative and that a stage-based evaluation be employed to guarantee the requisite freedoms at each stage.