The overall project aims to assess the needs of Syrian refugee youth in Turkey and to provide concrete policy recommendations for their integration.
The project will assess delivery and access to services such as education and healthcare, and will employ a comparative and historical approach that takes lessons from other states’ and from Turkey’s own past responses to mass refugee emergencies. Moreover, we will map the various local, regional, national and international governmental, voluntary, and humanitarian organisations currently working in Turkey in order to understand how and why refugees use these organisations to access services. This will allow us to evaluate the government response and gaps left by that response. Two of our particular concerns are access to education and transition into the labour market, especially critical for the age group under study. The ability of refugee youth to access education will play a critical role in Turkey’s immediate future, as it will determine whether or not Turkey will be able fully to make use of the human capital represented by this large, young population. Assuming that refugees are likely to remain in Turkey at least in the medium term, then, the project aims to improve access of refugee youth to education, health services, and the labour market in order to insure that this young population will contribute to Turkey’s growth rather than become an impediment to its development.