About the Project
Funded by the Open Society Foundation and in Partnership with Tamkeen, this research project endeavours to study the possible social and economic inclusion of both refugees and citizens in the wider society in Jordan to highlight the key role that is played by the active people with invisiblised rights.
View MoreJordanians citizens inflicted by inequalities at labour market opportunities as a result of complex socio-political grounds that limit the professional upgrade and confine them to underprivileged working conditions. While refugees are believed to lack the necessary physical and economic assets to live within vulnerability context of displacement, they have relied on networks of social capital to survive for several years. They have challenged the policy that restricted their employment in few sectors, to prove themselves with their expertise and worked in their field of speciality, illegally. Rather than emphasising the cumbersome load of their numbers, their origins, their legal status, their geographic location as a burden, this work seeks to underscore the benefit each person has brought to the wider society with their human and professional asset and the transformation they have instigated. It shall target economically active refugees with professional and vocational skills and study their professional journey before displacement, with all the narrative it may entail (of inherited traditional profession, entrepreneurship or vocational skills), and during the stay in the host country and the way they have taken a role in the labour market, whether legal or informal; “They live, love and work in the places where they reside, in turn contributing to – and in some cases transforming – those spaces and their associated social, economic and political processes”.