This Multi-country Economic Opportunity Assessment – made possible through a UNDP partnership with ILO, UNHCR, and WFP – provides pragmatic, empirically grounded approaches for achieving the ambitious goal of creating 1.1 million jobs for those impacted by the Syrian crisis.

This goal, set in the London Conference for Supporting Syria and the Region held in February 2016, included the creation of new jobs for both refugees from the Syrian crisis and the communities in Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and Turkey so generously hosting them. To drive new job creation, host governments committed to open their labour markets and improve the domestic regulatory environment and the international community committed to support employment creation programs and facilitate new investment.

The key finding from this study – based on some 120 interviews with the business community, government representatives, NGOs, donors and international organizations across Syria and its five refugee-hosting neighbours – is that facilitating access to economic opportunities must be a central component for a sustainable response to the crisis.

Interviewees across the six countries were emphatic that expanded economic opportunities are essential to attenuating the social tensions of the conflict, and that increased access to economic opportunities for the workers and entrepreneurs displaced by the Syrian conflict would directly benefit host communities.

Drawing on country-specific data collection and examining existing approaches employed to support job creation in response to the crisis, the multi-country framework for this assessment allows identification of good practices and lessons learned for host governments and development partners.

The multi-country analysis characterized a range of good practices – i.e., ongoing activities perceived as effective that might be adaptable to other country contexts. These good practices include:

For host governments

* Reforming the regulatory environment for investment (which is ongoing in Jordan).

* Allowing unfettered access for refugees to the labour market (which has been a boon for the Iraqi economy).

For development partners,

* Using multi-year infrastructure projects to create the low- and medium-skilled jobs (which have proven successful in Lebanon in getting crisis-affected communities employed).

* Creating centres that function as “one-stop shops” for refugee integration – providing information, training, and employment matching services (which has been very successful in Turkey).

* Giving displaced Syrian entrepreneurs access to existing, previously unused industrial infrastructure (which is already yielding economic dividends in Egypt).

The research also identified key deficiencies and gaps in the current response to the crisis. These included:

* An over-focus on expanding the number of official work permits, rather than on expanding job opportunities in general, given the region’s limited formal sector.

* Insufficient and often poorly coordinated development programming, highlighted by the proliferation of poorly designed vocational training programs (e.g., misaligned with market needs, not reflective of refugee skills) and the emergence of redundant, and even competitive, programs.

As the Syrian crisis enters its sixth year, it is clear that expanding access to economic opportunities for those affected by the crisis must be a priority. This study offers pragmatic guidance on what is working (and what is not) to guide action at the region and at the country level.

The recent World Humanitarian Summit, held on May 23-24, 2016, in Istanbul, as well as the Supporting Syrians and the Region Conference in London, of February 4, 2016, represented important milestones in the search for more sustainable responses to complex and protracted crisis.

The  international  community  has  been  piloting  an  integrated  humanitarian,  development  and  government  response  to  the  crisis  in  the  region  of  Syria.