Supported by UNHCR

Solutions & Models

The Global Refugee Accommodation Working Group promotes innovative affordable ASH responses and solutions for refugees and other newly arrived persons. It does so through sharing new and promising approaches, models, and initiatives.

Explore Refugee Resettlement and Accommodation Solutions By Country

The Global Refugee Accommodation Working Group developed a policy source to inform stakeholders on how housing works in different resettlement countries, create a baseline for effective cross-national knowledge exchange, and inspire stakeholders to overcome challenges. To date, this project explores Ireland and the United States of America, with expansion efforts ongoing to represent other countries. The long-term goal is to reflect all countries of resettlement, as well as potentially countries of first asylum

Explore a Refugee's Journey

United States

Launch Capital Partners

Launch Capital Partners is a real estate investment firm realizing the value refugees bring to their properties as reliable, quality tenants. By focusing on providing attainable housing to refugees, Launch Capital Partners has seen significantly fewer vacancies, lower tenant turnover, and consistent rental payment above the national average for multi-family affordable properties. Their model of centrally owned property management and in-house Resident Managers is an adaptable model for establishing more "high-profit, high-impact" communities across the United States.

Sweden

Blick Arkitektur

Blick Arkitektur is a community development-focused architecture firm that undertook a project to repurpose unused office buildings marked for demolition. They designed ways to rebuild these structures into homes, increasing local housing stock while avoiding wasted resources. This model of reuse is growing in Sweden as a way to turn buildings "previously perceived as a burden" into housing opportunities.

More Solutions from Around the Globe

New Law Seeks to Turn Refugee Camps into Permanent Settlements

Kenya hosts close to one million refugees. Most of them live in the Kakuma and Dadaab refugee camps. Around 100,000 live in urban areas. Kenya recently passed a new Refugee Act. One of the novelties of the Act is the goal to turn refugee camps into more permanent urban settlement areas, which includes a new way of thinking about how temporary dwellings can be converted to feature permanent housing along with building out critical infrastructure and key community institutions.

Architecture Students Propose New Housing Solutions

A project featuring architecture students from the University of Buffalo sought to build on existing housing solutions in Uganda to provide concrete new approaches that would expand access to safe and decent housing for refugees. The new solutions include combining elements from “primitive” and modular housing structures, using available local materials, reducing hardware and construction material costs in different ways, and putting different porotypes to the test.

How Refugee Camps Become Urbanized

A recent study suggests that policy makers should rethink the nature of the refugee camp, in particular by looking at refugee camps through the lenses of urbanization processes, the fluid relationship between informality/formality, and governance. The study empirically focuses on the Al Nasr camp in Jordan. It shows that Al Nasr has undergone urbanization through various processes, including the establishment of weekly fresh food markets, and a degree of economic interdependence between formal and informal utility service providers.

Addressing Housing for Asylum Seekers Requires Multiple Assistance Tracks, New Study Suggests

A recent study suggests a new perspective for assessing housing outcomes for asylum seekers in Spain, namely by looking at how housing outcomes are mediated by community networks, NGOs, and private landlords, housing markets, and the asylum reception system. The study recommends a “fundamental need to adapt the reception system to the different profiles of asylum seekers. This would necessarily entail not only lengthening the time frame of each phase in cases of need, but also creating specific tracks for people in situations of high vulnerability.”

Supported by UNHCR

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