The Financial Portfolios of Refugees, Migrants and Displaced People

Speaker: Kim Wilson, The Fletcher School, Tufts University, USA

Have you ever wondered how individuals and groups finance their long distance journeys across multiple countries and continents? Or how they integrate financially into local economies once their journeys end?

This talk takes us on a tour of financial passages of refugees and migrants. We first explore some of the ways in which refugees and migrants finance their journeys. We then investigate the ways in which they do or don’t financially integrate with their host communities. We examine how in welcoming economies displaced people are able to ratchet up their livelihoods and widen their financial portfolios. We also look at what happens in less welcoming economies.

About the speaker 

Kim Wilson is a Sr. Lecturer in Human Security and International Business at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University, where she teaches courses in Financial Inclusion, Market Approaches to Development, and Transnational Human Security. She is also a practitioner in several development sectors including financial inclusion and micro-franchising. She publishes in journals on the topic of financial resilience. She is co-editor of the book, Financial Promise for the Poor, How Groups Build Microsavings (Kumarian Press) and Academic Director for the Fletcher Leadership Program for Financial Inclusion as well as for a course sponsored by the Digital Frontiers Institute called “Digital Money.” Since 2016 her research has focused on the financial passages and resilience of refugees and migrants. To that end, she has overseen studies that include more than 500 deeply qualitative interviews with migrants and refugees in ten research sites. Her work and that of her researchers can be found on the Journeys Project site at Tufts University