Chapter 5: Djibouti: Refugees More Vulnerable Than Nationals 137
refugee households than the others, considering their vulnerable preCOVID-19 position. Moreover, village-based refugees’ food security trails behind that of urban refugees and nationals. Among these refugees, a larger proportion reported their children having skipped a meal in the past 30 days than did national and urban refugee households. And although 82 percent of national households and 86 percent of urban refugees have an acceptable food consumption score, just 47 percent of village-based refugee households do. The safety nets in Djibouti play a vital role in protecting the most vulnerable. Indeed, especially for village-based refugees, a lower proportion of households with poor food consumption is seen among those who receive food assistance.
Notes 1. The surveyor preferably tried to interview the previous wave’s respondents for the panel households, and the household head or closest related household member for the replacement in refugee households. 2. The refugee subsample is drawn from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees registries and identified by the National Institute of Statistics of Djibouti in a 2019 listing exercise. 3. Phone surveys are useful in the pandemic as a way to collect data without risking spread of COVID-19. However, they necessarily only include households with access to a live mobile phone line, and so may omit poor households. To overcome this, reweighting techniques were applied to bring the statistics here as close to being representative of the full refugee and urban national populations as possible. 4. However, where multiple disaggregation is necessary, the sample size may not be sufficient to draw robust conclusions. 5. The Profiling Survey Report of Refugee Villages in 2019 (Rapport d’enquête profilage dans les villages de réfugiés 2019), by the Institute of Statistics of Djibouti, Ministry of Social Affairs and Solidarity, World Food Program, and UN Refugee Agency (2020). Note that contrary to the Profiling Survey Report of 2019, which measures the employment rate, the present COVID-19 survey only captures employment of breadwinners; therefore the figures are not necessarily comparable. 6. Ideally, the pre-COVID-19 employment characteristics of the breadwinners who were working before COVID-19 but were not working before the survey would be compared with those of breadwinners who were working before COVID-19 and were working before the survey. However, the questionnaire does not ask former employment characteristics for those currently working. 7. Notice that among the 208 breadwinners who received no pay at all the week before the survey, 60 percent did not work, and 39 percent worked less than usual. Among the 167 breadwinners who did not work at all the week before the survey, 69 percent received no pay, 21 percent received a full payment, and 8 percent a partial payment.
