Settlement Opportunity and Community Finance in Refugee Livelihoods: Evidence from Northern Uganda

Protracted displacement is increasingly addressed through rights-based frameworks that promote refugee self-reliance and market participation. However, in low-income hosting contexts, legal entitlements alone do not ensure livelihoods or sustained investments in human capital. This paper examines how two complementary development mechanisms—settlement opportunity space and community-based finance—are associated with women’s economic outcomes and children’s schooling in northern Uganda. Settlement opportunity space refers to the local level, while community-based finance primarily involves participation in Village Savings and Loan Associations (VSLAs). By using original household survey data collected in 2025 from two refugee settlements, the study estimates multivariate logistic regression models for women’s employment, women’s business ownership, and children’s school participation, with propensity-score weighting as a robustness check. The results show that settlement context is strongly associated with women’s employment, whilst participation in Village Savings and Loan Associations (VSLAs) is strongly associated with women’s entrepreneurship and is positively associated with children’s school participation. The findings suggest that rights-based refugee policies become development-effective when paired with market connectivity and accessible household-level finance.