Paving a way to digital livelihoods
In Malawi, online work could be a lifeline for refugees. UNHCR is innovating to help them access it.
A majority of the more than 53,000 refugees in Malawi live in the Dzaleka refugee camp. Just northeast of Lilongwe, the country’s capital, Dzaleka was built for 10,000 people but now hosts more than 53,000 individuals. Movement restrictions mean residents must seek work inside the camp, where demand far outstrips supply — making digital livelihoods a potentially invaluable tool to advance self-reliance.
So, with the support of the Digital Innovation Fund, UNHCR partnered with the Jesuit Refugee Service (JRS) and digital education organization Konexio to explore ways to effectively open up opportunities in the global digital economy. Building on an existing JRS project, this joint initiative aimed to provide interested community members with digital skills mentorship as well as an introduction to digital labour platforms for those wishing to pursue online earning opportunities.
Following the training, a majority of the 58 project participants had succeeded in registering a profile on the online freelancing platform UpWork and, within 6 months, the cohort had collectively earned more than 20,000 USD, through a diverse array of jobs, including data entry, translation, transcription, graphic design, and online marketing, primarily for international companies.
Innovating to address challenges
Malawi’s encampment policy, limited livelihoods, and increasing food insecurity combine to make online work a highly attractive opportunity. But, in order to benefit from it, refugees need to not only gain relevant digital skills but also have access to a digital device, fulfill requirements to use online work platforms, offer in-demand services, gain the trust of employers, and enjoy relatively fast and reliable connectivity. A tall order, within the camp context.
To overcome these barriers, the project pivoted from earlier iterations of the programme (which had primarily focused on web design) to include a more diverse array of practical skills, including English language training, web navigation, and the basics of online freelancing. Based on participants’ preferences, they then embarked on career specialization through Coursera to enhance employability.
“When I started I didn’t even know how to turn on the computer. I knew nothing, absolutely nothing. I had no skills for sure. But then JRS really helped us to have those skills and they also trained us how to use computers. So now, I can use a computer and I’m comfortable working online.” — Vanessa Mango Kevine, project participant
To address device access issues, 10 new laptops, alongside older models, were made available for the participants’ use and — in response to increasing insecurity in the camp, which meant students could not take the devices home — the connected centre remained open during weekends and holidays.
Connectivity is foundational to any digital employment effort and was not always smooth sailing. Internet was provided to participants at the connected centre, but the service provider experienced challenges providing the bandwidth required, while power cuts occasionally interrupted learning and inflation meant an abrupt increase in the cost of connectivity.
Then, when it came time to register on freelancing platforms, several participants experienced delays because they lacked identification documents. UNHCR worked with them to secure IDs, but technical challenges slowed this process considerably.
Moving from learning to earning
Of the 58 participants — 54 of whom were refugees while the remaining 4 were Malawian, with 38 men and 20 women — 42 registered personal profiles on online work platforms and, within the first six months of finishing their training, more than half of those participants had secured contract work. These gigs involved data entry, translation, graphic design, online marketing, and more, resulting in a total of 21,137 USD earned by participants from September 2022 to mid-2023 — an earning for each freelancer that is well above the national average annual income.
For Vanessa Mango Kevine, a 25-year-old participant originally from the Democratic Republic of Congo who focuses primarily on translation work, the shift from learning to earning was not straightforward. To begin with, she had no experience — nothing to prove that clients should trust her with her projects. “It wasn’t easy for sure,” she says. “There were some times when I wanted to give up and say I’m not doing anything. But after I kept on trying, I started having some contracts.”
Bridging the learning-to-earning gap can benefit from thoughtful interventions — for example, including practical, project-based training that enable participants to develop portfolios of work during their training journeys that can be marketed later when seeking earning opportunities.
In Malawi, the project organizers ensured that the connected centre and the digital devices were available for students as they embarked on their online work. For Vanessa, the good comments from her first contract helped her success to snowball and, like a couple of other participants, she soon made enough from her freelancing to buy her own computer.
Ongoing barriers to self-reliance
For Vanessa, being able to translate in and out of multiple languages — as well as feeling comfortable in other fields, including data entry and graphic design — has been highly useful. “Because you never know what kind of contract you’ll have,” she says. “You just have to learn something new every day so that out of everything that they [post to the online work platform], you can at least manage to do something.” The need for such flexibility highlights the benefits of acquiring employability skills that help candidates to effectively market themselves to various work offers, in addition to developing specific technical skills.
Nevertheless, some months she doesn’t manage to find any contracts at all. In one year, she estimates to have made around 1,000 USD. In Dzaleka, with her family no longer receiving food assistance, it’s not enough. “It’s still hard,” she says. “But then we’re just thankful. We’re just grateful to have it. It’s better to have it than to not have it.”
Project participants have noted that many of the jobs available to them are relatively low paying, and that they are passed over for better remunerated work. Some have been inspired to enroll for other courses that will equip them with high demand skills, in order to secure better paying jobs.
“I’m very proud of myself, because now I can make something and help the family some other way,” Vanessa says. “But also, it’s not really enough for now because in truth I won’t make more and more again. For me to do that, I need to move, because by staying here there are some limitations.”
Those limitations include expensive and unreliable connectivity, low trust from potential employers who might have a skewed perception of the applicants’ capabilities based on their citizenship status or their living situation, and a lack of understanding from actual employers if challenges (for instance, related to unstable internet or power outages) do arise.
“In Dzaleka of course I can still earn online but I don’t always have internet. We need to buy, and it costs everything that I have.”
Key learnings to inform future initiatives
A core precondition to successful engagement in the digital economy is motivation to expend time and effort on securing online work, based on an awareness of the available opportunities. This project, says Priscilla Kalumo — who worked on the initiative as an Associate Education Officer with UNHCR Malawi — “is kind of an experimental stage, where they’re just convincing students that the opportunities are there. This enables them to direct their studies in the future to try to tailor their skills toward better opportunities.”
Nevertheless, the project implementation demonstrated that the success of digital employment initiatives rests not only on enthusiasm and skills (digital and otherwise) — but also, crucially, on basic infrastructure, connectivity, recognized identification documents, and support to make the transition from learning to earning. Working with online work platforms to ensure refugees are easily able to register on these sites, and exploring affordable and reliable connectivity solutions, will be key to effective initiatives in the future.
Moreover, strategic monitoring of participants to understand who is succeeding, who is not, and why will provide essential learnings to inform future work in this space, so UNHCR can take more effective action toward ensuring that our global digital economy leaves no one behind.
Despite the challenges, Priscilla described the project as potentially and actually transformational. “58 young men and women have been given hope to think beyond the refugee camp and to plan their life and future,” she said. Vanessa agrees that the training and the resulting work has opened up new horizons. “It really makes me optimistic, because now I can manage to make money and I can even help my family with something.”
Learn more about the Digital Innovation Fund and explore our PROSPECTS work, which focuses on building a fairer digital economy for refugees.
