Why investing in refugees benefits host communities and the refugees’ country of origin

ENAR

“We, the Syrian refugees in Lebanon, cannot take it anymore as the hunger is in our body, and the body of our children was ruined because of the lack of food and the quarantine. The evidence of our commitment to the general mobilization and the quarantine is that none of the refugees caught the virus. We committed and prevented the spread of the Coronavirus, but where is your commitment to us especially in this holy Ramadan month?” Cited above is the message sent by more than one hundred Syrian refugees in Lebanon to UNHCR in mid-April 2020. It echoes the call of hundreds of thousands of other men and women living as refugees in villages and cities across Lebanon. Years of displacement with few possibilities to earn a stable income, coupled with monthly payments of rent, food, medicine and other basic expenses, has depleted any savings refugees carried with them