Amid prolonged and mounting displacement, Ethiopia in 2025 advanced a new vision for refugee management that is designed to encourage individuals’ self-sustainability, reduce government costs, and position the country to benefit from humanitarian migrants’ stay. Parts of the draft policy, called Makatet (“inclusion” in Amharic), have already been implemented and been received with open arms by foreign governments and aid organizations. Recently departed UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi has praised it as reducing burdens on Ethiopia’s refugee agency, Refugees and Returnees Services (RRS), and the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) by distributing responsibility across an array of government bodies and the wider development sector.

Makatet consolidates an approach that Ethiopia has taken since 2016, and includes efforts to bring refugees into the national education and health-care systems, offer them work permits and national identification cards, and allow them to form community advocacy organizations. It is especially notable against the current backdrop of high displacement and lower international funding. As of January 2026, Ethiopia hosted more than 1.1 million refugees and asylum seekers, a significant increase over recent years. These migrants came from 27 countries, with the largest numbers from South Sudan (483,000), Somalia (361,000), and Eritrea (170,000). Another 2 million people have been displaced internally, largely by a 2020-22 civil war with rebels from the northern Tigray region. Meanwhile, international donors have cut foreign assistance, with wide-ranging consequences for refugee-hosting countries globally.

Amid this turbulence, proponents of Ethiopia’s model argue that it holds the potential to be sustainable. Grandi and others have said as much, given the combination of cost savings and the focus on refugees as an investment rather than an expenditure.

But key questions are unresolved and tensions remain, not least of which being that additional resources are necessary to make inclusion work. Moreover, a large number of Eritreans in Addis Ababa, the capital, are not poised to benefit from the reforms because they have been unable to obtain legal refugee or other status, raising broader questions about the principle of protection. Based in part on research conducted by the authors, this article explores Ethiopia’s inclusion-first refugee approach and the challenges that remain.

A History of Ethiopia’s Refugee Hosting

Ethiopia’s experience hosting significant numbers of refugees dates back to the early 1960s. Since then, the country has been at the forefront of new refugee paradigms and initiatives, however its refugee management has also balanced security and economic concerns.

Refugees from pre-independence Southern Sudan began appearing in Ethiopia’s western Gambella area in the early 1960s, and many stayed until the 1972 Addis Ababa Agreement between rebels and the Sudanese government. Ethiopia committed to the 1951 UN Refugee Convention, acceded to it in 1969, and was a key architect of the 1969 Organization of African Unity (OAU) Convention Governing the Specific Aspects of Refugee Problems in Africa, which it ratified in 1973.

Ethiopia welcomed UNHCR into the country in 1967. Historically Ethiopia has restricted refugees to camps located in border areas close to their origin countries and has been wary of large influxes into Addis Ababa. To this day, the largest populations are located in the Gambella, Somali, and Benishangul-Gumuz regions, all of which are near the border (see Figure 2). In the 2010s, the government started relaxing its strict refugee encampment policy with the introduction of the out-of-camp program. This new scheme initially applied only to Eritrean refugees, due to their historic ties with Ethiopia, allowing them to reside anywhere they liked provided they could support themselves. During the Tigray war, large numbers of Eritrean refugees relocated to Addis Ababa, making the city the fourth largest location of residence as of this writing. However, government policies continue to limit how many refugees can legally live in Addis Ababa and divert others to the border areas.

Ethiopia made nine pledges at the September 2016 New York Summit for Refugees and Migrants to advance refugees’ self-reliance and integration, and the next year became a pilot country for the Comprehensive Refugee Response Framework (CRRF) to implement these pledges. However, they remained unimplemented until the 2019 revision of Ethiopia’s refugee proclamation; even after that, refugees did not immediately experience these changes.

Regional instability and other challenges slowed implementation. The war in Sudan has resulted in a large influx of Sudanese refugees into Ethiopia, a situation worsened by ongoing conflicts in South Sudan. Regional volatility makes it challenging to achieve lasting solutions for refugees, such as voluntary repatriation. Additionally, the line between internally displaced persons and refugees has become blurred, with some host communities themselves being displaced, complicating humanitarian efforts. Adding to these challenges is the controversial rollback of prima facie status determination for Eritrean refugees (discussed more below). The combined effect of these pressures has led to a refugee-hosting system that has struggled to maintain humanitarian standards and fulfill its international protection commitments.

Makatet: An Overview

Makatet was introduced in 2025, building on the pledges and proclamations presented at the Global Refugee Forum in 2019 and 2023. The approach aims to remove barriers to inclusion and foster long-term resilience for both refugees and host communities by ensuring equitable access to employment and land, as well as services such as education and health care.

Makatet is a five-year framework, beginning in 2025, that aims to consolidate and coordinate previously disconnected efforts in various areas, including laws, policy frameworks, area-based plans, and programming, ensuring key stakeholders collaborate toward a shared goal. The roadmap aims to dissolve the parallel service-delivery system run by humanitarian agencies and instead develop the capacities of national and regional government institutions that will serve refugees alongside host communities. This means eliminating separate education and health-care systems for refugees and Ethiopian nationals. In theory, this could remove redundancies and streamline government systems while giving refugees access to better services and opportunities.  

Although the approach is still in draft form, there already have been improvements for refugees that can be credited to Makatet. For example, guidelines allow refugees to acquire work permits and business licenses, both of which had previously been almost impossible to obtain. Refugees have also been given the right to form refugee-led organizations that advocate for refugees and help educate communities about refugee law.

Ethiopia’s new biometric ID card, Fayda, is also being given to refugees, allowing them to open bank accounts and, for those in urban areas, access the national health-care system and public schools. Although Fayda is part of a broader country-wide initiative, the inclusion of refugees in Fayda is made possible through Makatet’s emphasis on consolidating services and coordinating refugee services across all branches of government.

The Makatet Roadmap is ambitious but also has vulnerabilities, most significantly those stemming from assumed international support. This is a daunting hurdle to achieve amid proliferating global crises, donor fatigue, and an isolationist turn in many high-income countries.

Other challenges are domestic, including fragile political stability, insecurity in border regions that host refugees, and severe economic challenges. As with other broad-based approaches, the ambitious coordination structures may be prone to bureaucratic challenges and dysfunction. Also, in refugee-hosting border regions, host communities are similarly impoverished; it requires careful management to address the needs of both refugees and the host community using limited resources and to foster social cohesion to prevent tensions.

Inclusion Is Not Free: The Challenge of Funding Makatet

Makatet is intended, in part, to reduce the costs of hosting refugees. However there are concerns it will lead to a situation in which resources are also reduced—potentially to nothing. While aiming to streamline services, government representatives have expressed a need for additional funding. The national health and education systems are already strained, as demonstrated by a national teacher shortage and recent health-care-worker strike. Questions remain about how beleaguered systems like these will serve new populations without additional resources.

The western Gambella region, along the border with South Sudan, provides a warning. The region’s population was estimated to be approximately 508,000 as of September 2025, not counting the roughly 447,000 refugees and asylum seekers. Refugees largely depend on international aid for food and health care, and have faced severe shortages amid recent funding rollbacks by international governments that historically have provided foreign aid. It is unclear how Makatet will fix this problem without additional resources. At present, the national budget for health care and education is based on regions’ population of Ethiopian nationals—not refugees—and there has been no budget increase to accommodate refugees, according to the authors’ mid-2025 interviews with Ministry of Education officials. This oversight raises concerns about resource scarcity and potential tensions.

The funding challenge is particularly critical for refugees’ education. Even before Makatet, Ethiopia’s refugee management faced challenges related to scarce resources and difficulties transferring oversight from RRS to other ministries, particularly in education. The sector has experienced significant budget reductions, and projected a $4.4 million funding shortfall in 2024 causing 187,000 refugee students to be out of school. As part of an earlier period of refugee integration, schools were transferred from refugee-serving nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to regional education bureaus in March 2025, but this process faced multiple challenges. The government has taken a more cautious approach with elementary schools, opting for “harmonization” involving consolidating things such as teacher training and textbooks, but not school administration or teacher hiring. However, it is unclear how long NGOs will be able to retain funding to manage these schools.

RRS and refugee-serving organizations have sought to continue administering schools for refugees, partly because of the challenges of recruiting and retaining teachers to work there. To incentivize teachers, NGOs typically awarded them extra pay. It proved difficult to recruit teachers when these incentives were not offered, leading to a World Bank-supported agreement to temporarily pay incentives to teachers working in government schools in refugee-serving areas; however, this agreement has phased out, leading to uncertainties about teacher quality in secondary schools.

Although harmonization is discussed as temporary, it is unclear when the Ministry of Education will take over primary schools’ administration. As a stop-gap measure, UNHCR has planned to temporarily continue funding organizations that administer primary schools in refugee areas. Having learned from the prior experience with secondary schools, the government seems unwilling to take on these primary schools.

In Urban Areas, Inclusion Has Been Exclusive

Makatet could be particularly promising for refugees in urban areas who have the Fayda ID card and may be able to secure a work permit or business license; however, many people in Addis Ababa are excluded from these possibilities. A significant number of Eritreans have not been able to acquire refugee status, while others’ documents have lapsed, leaving them without legal status.

Ethiopia prides itself on its open-door refugee policy and has a history of granting prima facie status to people from many neighboring countries. While this remains the case for refugees from South Sudan, Sudan, Somalia, and Yemen, the government in January 2020 announced that Eritreans would be ineligible for prima facie status. This decision was motivated by normalized relations between the two governments beginning in 2018, after years of tensions. However, Eritreans have continued to flee their country, with an estimated 20,000 Eritreans crossing into Ethiopia in early 2024.

Without the promise of prima facie status, Eritreans must undergo individual status determination processes to acquire refugee status in Ethiopia; however, there has been no consistent, clear process for them to do so. Interviewees told the authors in mid-2025 that obtaining legal status in Ethiopia was nearly impossible. Officially there are two pathways for new arrivals: They can work through the immigration system and either request a tourist visa or apply for asylum, or they can return to a refugee processing center near the border to file an asylum application. Asylum applications are supposed to be referred to RRS, however it has not granted refugee status to Eritreans since 2020.

The effective impossibility of acquiring refugee status means many individuals who would be eligible for protection opt for a tourist or other visa to avoid living without status, However, many cannot afford to do so, since they may face fines of $10 per day in the country without authorization. Unable to afford these fines, many people are stuck without options.

Claiming asylum at one of the refugee processing centers near the border is even less viable. With the exception of refugees in the northeastern Afar who have crossed through the Danakil desert and must register at camps in that region, most Eritreans must travel to the Alemwach camp in the northern Amhara region. Alemwach is in the middle of a rebel-held area where refugees and others face food insecurity and violence. In Alemwach refugees have been shot, stabbed, and robbed; at least nine died from violence in 2024. As a result, as many as tens of thousands of Eritreans lacking legal status have stayed in Addis Ababa.

To further complicate matters, many individuals in Addis Ababa have refugee status but are not part of the official out-of-camp program introduced in the 2010s, and therefore have no official permission to live in the city. Most of these refugees moved to the capital during the 2020 Tigray war. UNHCR noted a subsequent jump in the urban refugee population from 36,000 to 71,400 in the year immediately after the war started, and a steady rise since then. Prior to the war, Eritrean refugees who did not have official out-of-camp status were hosted in camps in the Tigray and Afar regions. Two of the Tigray camps were destroyed in the war and the others were subsequently closed. Effectively, there is no camp for these refugees to return to.

These self-relocated refugees in Addis Ababa exist in a liminal state: They have been granted refugee status but have not been able to renew documents. Refugees with expired documents may not be charged fines, but they will not have adequate documentation to receive the Fayda, a work permit, or business license. They also face many of the same vulnerabilities as individuals without legal status and are more likely to be arbitrarily arrested and face prolonged detention.

Many urban refugees, particularly those with expired documents, and immigrants without legal status have expressed concern about being able to acquire the Fayda. Furthermore, while Fayda potentially helps refugees integrate, some are concerned that it will serve as a tool to surveil and exclude them. Because their refugee ID number is attached to their Fayda, refugees feel they are easily identifiable both by police and in institutions such as schools, making them feel vulnerable. People also worry that children—including those born in Ethiopia to Eritreans without legal status—will not be able to receive a Fayda to attend school.

Urban refugees attending Ethiopian schools have described experiencing discrimination, illuminating some of the problems that can arise when institutions not designed to serve refugees are charged with doing so. One interviewee told the authors that some schools charged refugees a special textbook deposit because administrators feared students might leave the country before returning books. Another said that some school directors refused to register refugees.

Claims of Stigma, Harassment, and Extortion

The costs of lacking legal status are severe. However, even legally present humanitarian migrants in urban areas face significant risks of arrest, detention, extortion, and possible deportation. Multiple refugee organizations have highlighted cases of illegal arrests and deportations of migrants both with and without refugee status. Interviewees said they felt like they were being “hunted” by police. Refugees reported hearing that friends, neighbors and family members have been arrested on a near-daily basis.

“People are afraid to leave their houses,” a refugee leader told the authors. “They are just working in the home.” Another refugee leader recounted a case he had heard in which a refugee was arrested while taking food to someone in detention. Refugee leaders also shared stories of parents being arrested while taking children to school. For refugees with legal status, RRS, the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission, and other organizations are able to intervene and get them released, although certain prisons are notorious for refusing to release even legally present refugees. Meanwhile those who lack proper documentation are often detained for an extended period.

Extortion appears to be one of the main motivations for arresting these migrants. “They think we are all millionaires” a refugee said, referencing a common stereotype that Eritreans receive large remittances. The interviewee detailed negotiations with police trying to extract the largest possible bribe to secure migrants’ release, sometimes altering the price to maximize their take.

Many Eritreans believe these arrests are motivated by newly strained political relations between Eritrea and Ethiopia, claiming police may think Eritreans are a potential security threat. The authors heard one account that someone was arrested for flying an Eritrean flag. Many drew comparisons with the political climate at the time of the 1998 border war, during which tens of thousands of people of Eritrean descent, most of whom were Ethiopian citizens, were deported from Ethiopia.

While Makatet promises to be more inclusive, to blur the lines between refugees and hosts, and to significantly improve livelihoods, some migrants in urban areas need more protection than ever. As Makatet disseminates responsibility for refugees across the government, and as organizations responsible for refugee protection face substantial funding cuts, it is unclear who will pick up the slack. While the spotlight shines on the increasing numbers who are included, it is also important to note that large numbers of migrants of all legal statuses are excluded from the possibility of utilizing services such as education and engaging in livelihood activities, being made all the more vulnerable.

The Promises—and Limitations—of an Inclusion-First Agenda

Policies such as Makatet are promising. The policy’s underlying ethos is that refugees should be integrated into society and given a chance to work and struggle alongside Ethiopians. Makatet has also been praised for its potential cost savings as it reduces potential inefficiencies inherent in parallel service delivery.

However, inclusion alone may not be the panacea it is promised to be. Anxieties surrounding the costs of serving refugees in the national education and health-care systems are already mounting. Early experiences in education demonstrate that, for inclusion to be effective, teachers must be adequately trained and incentivized to work with refugee populations.

Perhaps most importantly, inclusion as designed is not for all. Ethiopia’s roadmap makes significant progress in realizing many long-awaited policies, but they remain out of reach for those who have no pathway to acquire refugee status or to renew their expired documents. All the while, many refugees remain subject to violence, arrest, and harm, including from authorities. While Makatet’s promise of inclusion would seem to be a major step forward, it alone will not address these grave protection concerns.

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