Do Information Communication Technologies (ICTs) Support Self-Reliance among Urban Refugees?

Information communication technologies (ICTs) are an increasingly ubiquitous part of daily life for urban refugees (e.g., GSMA 2017; Patil 2019; Eppler et al. 2020; Dressa 2021). Urban refugees and displaced people use ICTs to meet individual administrative, social, or emotional needs, or what technology and media scholars call “affordances” (e.g., Faraj and Azad 2012).1 In this article, we extend the concept of affordances, or individual-level uses of ICTs, to the refugee policy level, using an empirical framework based on the concept of refugee self-reliance in urban settings. Self-reliance is particularly salient for urban refugees since they live outside the formal administration of camp settings and end up having to meet their own needs through formal and informal economic and social activities (UNHCR 2009). Extending the concept of affordances to understand the concept of refugee self-reliance allows us to ask the question: Do ICT affordances support urban refugees’ self-reliance in Kuala Lumpur and Penang, Malaysia, a middle-income refugee host country? We used structured interviews, conducted in 2019, to ask whether refugees living in Kuala Lumpur and Penang who arrived from Myanmar, Somalia, and Pakistan used ICTs to support self-reliance across five domains drawn from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees’ (UNHCR) definition of refugee self-reliance: economic inclusion (e.g., access to jobs and financial services), accessing education, finding healthcare, managing administrative processes, and providing for their own safety in host countries (UNHCR 2005).

Refugees in both high- and low-income host countries around the world could use ICTs to do these things, and indeed, there is evidence that ICTs improve refugees’ access to administrative services in high-income resettlement countries like the United States and New Zealand (e.g., Kabbar and Crump 2007; Evans, Perry, and Factor 2019). However, in the middle- and low-income countries, access to public services can be constrained or non-existent, often due to hostile policy environments and/or a lack of political will.2 In such contexts, digital technologies have the potential to create opportunities for urban refugees to establish self-reliance at the community level and to coordinate more effectively with the UNHCR and local non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Malaysia provides a context to better understand what the future of refugees’ self-reliance and digital practices could look like in a world where refugees spend increasingly long time periods in host countries awaiting resettlement, while at the same time global refugee response policy is moving away from refugee encampment and toward local integration (Grant 2016; Brankamp 2022). Malaysia has no encampment policy, no refugee or asylum legislation, and a large refugee population (UNHCR Malaysia 2022a). Many refugees in Malaysia reside in urban enclaves and must meet their social, economic, and administrative needs either on their own or through community-based organizations (ibid.). While the UNHCR's local office provides refugees in Malaysia with as much support as possible, effectively, most refugees in the country must be self-reliant to survive (UNHCR Malaysia 2022b).

We found that ICTs made it easier for urban refugees in Malaysia to engage in community- and individual-level aspects of self-reliance, such as participating in community-organized safety programs and maintaining family/social connections. However, our findings indicate that ICTs had little effect on improving refugees’ self-reliance in domains that were closely tied to host-country laws, such as economic inclusion, or access to public education and health systems. Our results provide insights into how refugees’ ICT affordances help them achieve different aspects of self-reliance and add to the growing body of research on ICT use among urban refugees and migrants by analyzing how refugees’ ICT affordances align with formal and informal processes of refugee self-reliance (e.g., Danielson 2013; Martin-Shields et al. 2022). This research also sheds light on how ICTs fit into the lives of other displaced populations, such as people displaced by climate change or internally displaced people whose social safety net is being replaced with self-reliance policies. Thus, our research speaks to practical challenges and opportunities facing refugee and immigration authorities that are attempting to use ICTs to engage with and support displaced populations (e.g., Kluzer and Rissola 2009; Green 2020; IOM 2020).