How Data Silos and Rivalries Squander Livelihood Opportunities in African Settlements
FEATURED BLOG
How Data Silos and Rivalries Squander Livelihood Opportunities in African Settlements
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Oct 2025
Africa hosts over 51 million forcibly displaced persons, the highest regional figure globally, with conflicts in Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Somalia accounting for the majority. UNHCR's Global Trends report for mid-2023 indicates that this number includes 36.4 million internally displaced persons and 7.2 million refugees, predominantly in Sub-Saharan Africa. These figures highlight the scale of protracted displacement, where systemic fragmentation in FDP-focused responses hinders effective livelihood-building, demanding reforms to integrate cross-sector collaboration, shared data, and community inclusion for sustainable job outcomes.
In northern Uganda's Bidi Bidi settlement, one of the world's largest hosting sites for forcibly displaced persons, uncoordinated water projects by multiple organizations led to overextraction of groundwater, causing water tables to drop and rendering boreholes unsustainable. Evaluations of Uganda's refugee response from 2016-2018, revealed that this fragmentation resulted in inefficiencies, including duplicated assessments and uneven resource distribution across sectors. This is partly due to a governance gap where isolated efforts fail to sustain livelihoods, amplifying vulnerabilities for over 200,000 South Sudanese forcibly displaced persons by disrupting access to essential resources needed for farming and small enterprises.
Kenya's Kakuma settlement is another example particularly in the beekeeping sector. Business support organizations that aim to build livelihoods by providing beehives to forcibly displaced individuals stumble upon systemic misalignment. Oftentimes, such organizations have provided resources like hives without coordinated training on beekeeping. Ultimately these assets often became derelict, repurposed as chicken coops, or used for firewood. Evidently, fragmented interventions squander resources and stifle economic prospects, trapping forcibly displaced individuals in dependency rather than promoting self-reliance through coordinated skills training and market integration.
As evidenced in the cases of Uganda and Kenya, business support organisations (BSOs) struggle to collaborate due to competitive funding models that favor short-term, branded projects over joint livelihood initiatives. A study on official development assistance in Sub-Saharan Africa by the Overseas Development Institute found that fragmented donor funding disperses resources across actors, reducing effectiveness in job creation programs. This incentivizes "flag-planting," where BSOs prioritize individual visibility, leading to misaligned efforts that overlook local labor market needs in settlements like Bidi Bidi or Dadaab, ultimately stalling economic integration for forcibly displaced workers.
Conflicting institutional mandates deepen these silos, with international organizations pursuing global priorities while local actors emphasize national development policies. The World Bank's analysis of forced displacement and jobs notes that such misalignment in multi-level responses leads to reactive programming, as seen in Uganda's 2016-2018 efforts where sectoral silos caused duplicated labor market assessments. This creates barriers to building resilient livelihoods, where international agendas overshadow host strategies, preventing the scaling of interventions like skills training that could address employment gaps for both hosts and forcibly displaced persons.
Data silos worsen targeting in livelihood programs, as unshared platforms lead to overlaps and missed opportunities for holistic support. UNHCR assessments in African contexts reveal that data fragmentation leads to a drop off of 20-30% of program budgets through redundant surveys, evident in West and Central Africa's 12.7 million displaced population. This inefficiency translates to substantial losses that could instead fund integrated livelihood initiatives, such as combining job matching with capital access. Meanwhile, excluding forcibly displaced voices reinforces top-down approaches that ignore settlement-specific constraints, like lack of social networks or legal challenges.
The impacts of data silos are profound: isolated interventions from support organizations inflate costs and deliver unsustainable job outcomes. A meta-analysis by Verme and Schuettler (2021) on forced displacement shows that employment effects on hosts are nonsignificant in over 60% of studies, with negative impacts in about 30%, often due to unaddressed labor market constraints. In practice, this means standalone programs amplify vulnerabilities, such as lower wages or underemployment in overcrowded settlements. These programs create cycles where barriers like uncertain time horizons or health issues, prevalent among forcibly displaced workers, hinder transformative economic participation.
Shared data platforms are crucial for alleviating siloed practices and enhancing precise targeting in livelihood-building. OECD evaluations of beneficiary programs show that coordinated data cuts inefficiencies, with value chain interventions costing a median $2.03 per dollar of additional income. In African settlements like Kakuma, this enables real-time integration, reallocating resources to address specific constraints like lack of skills or risk aversion, thereby improving job quality and long-term economic resilience.
Evidence further indicates that local organizations in Africa’s displacement context achieve 32% greater cost-efficiency in livelihood interventions than international ones, owing to reduced overheads and better contextual understanding. The Joint Data Center on Forced Displacement's synthesis reports that this efficiency stems from proximity to communities, enabling tailored responses that build assets and skills more effectively. This suggests that fragmented approaches miss opportunities for scalability, whereas collaborative models could lower the median cost per job created,from $392 in public works to $4,653 in training programs,by leveraging shared resources to sustain employment gains.
In addition, a layering approach can also address these challenges by synergizing multi-sector interventions to build livelihoods in targeted locations. Unlike isolated efforts, layering combines partners' strengths, such as grants with agricultural training and market access, to tackle interconnected constraints. In Kenya's Livelihoods and Inclusion for Transformation in Kenya (LIFT), a consortium led by BOMA and anchored in the Ministry of Labor integrated grants from BOMA, agricultural support from Dan Church Aid (DCA), and training from Smart Regional Consultants (SRC), yielding a 119% increase in savings and 31% rise in business sales in one quarter among northern Kenya's vulnerable communities. This illustrates how layering fosters sustainability, reduces duplication, and empowers forcibly displaced persons through comprehensive packages that single entities cannot provide, breaking poverty cycles via enhanced labor market outcomes.
Supporting businesses under a layered framework not only optimizes costs, delivering a median $14,000 per job across interventions, scalable lower with targeted grants, but transforms fragmented efforts into engines of lasting economic resilience. As the World Bank's review on forced displacement and jobs highlights, these initiatives break even in just 2-5 years at minimum wage when they prioritize high-quality, growth-oriented employment, sustaining impacts for a decade or more at median incomes. This underscores the profound value of collaboration in venture-like models within displacement contexts in Africa. While community inclusion and holistic support may elevate upfront investments, they dismantle silos, overcome barriers like data gaps and exclusion, and unlock broader ripple effects. By embracing layering over isolation, BSOs and international organisations can finally turn systemic waste into shared prosperity for forcibly displaced persons.