In August 2025, the Royal Thai Government granted refugees from Myanmar the right to work legally in Thailand, opening labor market access to a population that has lived in nine temporary shelters along the Thai-Myanmar border for decades. Less than a year later, the Joint Data Center's 4th Research Conference on Forced Displacement convened this June in Bangkok against the backdrop of this policy unfolding in real time. The meeting also took place amid a broader shift at UNHCR toward reducing the share of refugees dependent on aid by half by 2035. Over three days, the conference asked what self-reliance means in practice and what the evidence base can and cannot yet say about how to support displaced populations to achieve it. Four themes emerged across the conference’s academic sessions and policy panels.

1. Inclusive refugee policies benefit host countries, not just displaced populations.

The evidence base supporting inclusive refugee policy has grown substantially in recent years. For example, research on Colombia's regularization program for Venezuelan migrants, led by Sandra Rozo, Andrés Moya, and Ana Maria Ibáñez and implemented by IPA, has shown that the program produced meaningful gains for migrants, including increased earnings, healthcare access, and financial inclusion, without depressing wages or employment for Colombian workers. The findings were cited repeatedly across the conference, including by UNHCR Assistant High Commissioner Raouf Mazou. 

Thailand has emerged as a leading example of a host country advancing policies aligned with this growing evidence base. At the conference, the Thai government presented its plan to expand refugees' access to formal employment, building on reforms that have already enabled more than 5,500 refugees from Myanmar to join the workforce. Through the Displaced Livelihoods Initiative (DLI), IPA is supporting evaluations of right-to-work rollouts in both Thailand and Ethiopia, with findings expected to build a comparative evidence base on inclusive policy reform. 

2. Cash transfers and aid cuts alone do not produce self-reliance.

A second thread examined how far aid can move displaced populations toward self-reliance, and what happens when it is withdrawn before they get there. Across sessions, presenters returned to a now-established finding: cash transfers reliably improve food security and household consumption but do not, on their own, generate sustained economic recovery. Research by Antonia Delius in Kakuma found that an unconditional cash transfer program paired with a short mental health and life skills training improved food security, healthcare access, and household savings but did not change employment outcomes for most recipients. Those who started with better mental health invested the cash and had higher earnings, suggesting psychological capacity may shape who can convert cash into self-reliance. Similarly, a study by Sigrid Weber and the International Rescue Committee found that even layering a structured peer-network component on a cash transfer to refugee entrepreneurs in Nairobi and Kampala did not move outcomes beyond what cash achieved alone.

Aid cuts, meanwhile, do not push households into productive coping strategies. Researcher Shelby Carvalho presented work on a World Food Programme policy in Uganda that, in response to funding shortfalls, reduced assistance for refugees assessed as less vulnerable. The study found that households whose assistance was cut by half did not work or earn more, but took on debt to cover basic needs, with conditions worsening over time across entire settlements, including for households whose assistance was preserved. Together, these studies suggest  that cash buys time and consumption but does not buy self-reliance. The harder question is what to pair it with, and at what cost.

3. Mental health is a missing link in self-reliance.

Researcher Andrés Moya's closing keynote synthesized roughly two decades of research with displaced populations in Colombia to argue that mental health is a constraint on self-reliance that anti-poverty programs alone cannot address. Trauma, Moya argued, explains more than half of the effect of displacement and conflict on children's outcomes, including for children born after the original displacement event. He pointed to parenting programs which work in other contexts but tend to have little effect when the caregiver is experiencing a mental health condition, because the constraint is psychological rather than informational. Other work pointed the same direction: a randomized evaluation in Kakuma found that a light-touch mental health training reduced symptoms of depression and anxiety where a cash transfer alone did not, and a longitudinal study in Medellín documented cognitive and developmental gaps among displaced children that household wealth alone does not close. 

The implication is that programs need to address the psychological constraint directly. The community-based program Moya co-developed, Semillas de Apego, has shown sizable effects on caregiver mental health and on children's development outcomes, and is now operating at twelve times its original scale, an early example of mental health being built into self-reliance programming by design.

4. Data on displacement is reshaping policy decisions in real time.

The Bangladeshi government's relocation of tens of thousands of Rohingya refugees from Cox's Bazar to Bhasan Char, a remote island in the Bay of Bengal, was a striking example of evidence-driven policy reversal. Researcher María José Urbina presented an analysis drawing on the Cox's Bazar Panel Survey, which IPA collected with funding from the Peace and Recovery Initiative, showing sharply worse food security, mental health, and labor market outcomes at roughly three times the per-capita cost of supporting comparable refugees in Cox's Bazar. In response, the Bangladeshi government has suspended further relocations and is treating the project as not viable. The Colombia regularization findings discussed earlier sit alongside Bhasan Char as a second example of rigorous data feeding directly into how governments weigh major decisions.

What's next?

The conference marked a shift in the displacement policy conversation, from whether to support self-reliance to how to do so cost-effectively under tighter fiscal constraints. That shift needs a research agenda to match. On the margins of the conference, IPA convened a working session with researchers, policymakers, and practitioners to map the questions shaping the next generation of displacement research, including how to support sustained self-reliance, the role of mental health in livelihoods programming, and how to design effective host-country policies. Through DLI and the Peace and Recovery Initiative, IPA and our partners will be working on those questions in the years ahead. 

DLI funds innovative research to inform the design of policies and programs that empower refugees, internally displaced persons, asylum seekers, and others in refugee-like situations to achieve self-reliance. DLI supports collaborations between researchers and leaders in government, NGOs, and the private sector, with a particular view to the participation of persons with lived experience of displacement to address the unique challenges and opportunities faced by displaced populations and the communities that host them.