Person:
Hoogeveen, Johannes

Last updated: June 11, 2025

Biography

Johannes (Hans) Hoogeveen is a senior economist and global lead for Poverty and Fragility at the World Bank. When data collection for this volume started, he was practice manager for the Poverty and Equity team in the Middle East and North Africa region, allowing him to closely follow the initial steps leading to this volume. Currently, his attention is focused on the Sahel region and Central Africa while increasingly working on aspects related to refugee economic participation.

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Using Poverty Lines to Measure Refugee Self-Reliance
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-09-30) Hoogeveen, Johannes; Hopper, Robert
Humanitarian models of refugee assistance increasingly promote refugee self-reliance without offering a clear understanding of what constitutes self-reliance, or how to measure it, although measurement is essential to assess whether the promotion of self-reliance has been successful. This paper proposes an approach to measuring self-reliance rooted in global poverty measurement: a refugee is self-reliant if their self-earned income exceeds the locally relevant poverty line. In its empirical application, the paper uses estimates of self-reliance drawn from 11 consumption surveys, which present the universe of data that can be used for such purposes. Refugees in middle-income countries are found to be far more likely to be self-reliant than those in lower income countries, while refugees residing in urban and non-camp settings demonstrate higher levels of self-reliance than those in rural and camp environments, reflecting the presence of greater economic opportunities outside camps and in urban areas. The paper also finds evidence that aid and self-reliance are inversely correlated, with more aid spent in environments where refugee self-reliance is constrained. The paper argues that a different outcome should be envisaged, one in which governments that encourage refugees to be self-reliant receive more aid. Such an approach would be beneficial for refugees, who would gain financial autonomy, and for host country citizens, who often face high levels of poverty and at times are even poorer than refugees.
The Costs Come before the Benefits: Why Donors Should Invest More in Refugee Autonomy in Uganda
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2024-01-29) Atamanov, Aziz; Hoogeveen, Johannes; Reese, Benjamin
When host countries allow refugees to earn income, two main groups benefit: refugees, who become financially autonomous, and international institutions that can reduce the humanitarian aid that would otherwise be needed to support refugees. Uganda is one of the more progressive countries when it comes to promoting the financial independence of refugees and shifting from humanitarian aid to development ways of working. This note considers how successful refugees in Uganda have been in becoming financially independent and estimates how assistance has been saved due to these efforts at economic inclusion. Using the international poverty line of US$2.15 in 2017 purchasing power parities to proxy the costs of basic needs, the results suggest that the amount of total aid needed was reduced by almost 45 percent. They also show that many refugees live in poverty, implying that the present combination of aid and work is inadequate to assure a decent standard of living. While more assistance is needed in the short run, reductions in development assistance are feasible but require upfront investments in refugee earning capacity to realize them.
Responsibility Sharing and the Economic Participation of Refugees in Chad
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-03-22) Coulibaly, Mohamed; Hoogeveen, Johannes; Jourdan, Emilie; Savadogo, Aboudrahyme
The Global Compact on Refugees recognizes the importance of responsibility sharing for hosting, protecting, and assisting refugees, while emphasizing the potential of economic participation to reduce the cost of humanitarian assistance. This note explores the relative importance of aid in caring for refugees hosted in Chad and the importance of the incomes earned by the refugees. It finds that the combination of aid and self-earned incomes falls far short of a minimum standard of living (the poverty line) as a consequence of which the vast majority of refugees lives in abject poverty. It is also finds that although refugees are hosted in camps with relatively few economic opportunities, self-generated income covers 54 percent of the poverty line and aid only 14 percent. As Chad has adopted a policy of refugee inclusion and dispersion, the note then explores how much these progressive policies might increase the income earning potential of refugees. This is found to be substantial. Economic participation policies are estimated to reduce refugee poverty from 88 to 50 percent (thus increasing the self-sufficiency of refugees dramatically), while increasing the incomes generated by poor refugees by more than 50 percent. The greatest participation benefits will be realized when refugees move to areas with more economic potential.
Comparing Internally Displaced Persons with Those Left Behind: Evidence from the Central African Republic
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-03-19) Lain, Jonathan; Yama, Gervais Chamberlin; Hoogeveen, Johannes
Global poverty is increasingly becoming concentrated in conflict-affected settings. Therefore, assessing the welfare of those people displaced by conflict is of growing policy importance. Collecting and analyzing data on displaced people is challenging because sampling them is difficult, standard welfare metrics may not reflect their experiences, and they are highly heterogeneous. Assessing the welfare effects of displacement also hinges on constructing counterfactuals that show how internally displaced persons would have fared had they stayed in place. Displaced people typically come from a nonrandom subset of communities affected by conflict or other shocks, so comparing them with the rest of the population may be misleading. This paper addresses this issue using data from the Central African Republic, which recorded detailed information on displacement histories to isolate the communities from which those living in internally displaced person camps originated. Using these “catchment areas” for internally displaced person camps as a counterfactual suggests that although displaced households have lower monetary consumption and higher monetary poverty than the overall population, they may be no worse off on many key metrics than those left behind in the communities originally affected by conflict. Moreover, those left behind enjoy none of the benefits of being in camps, such as additional access to water and sanitation services. These results underline the importance of tailoring policies and data collection to consider those in communities originally affected by conflict, just as practitioners are doing for displaced populations.
Making Refugee Self-Reliance Work: From Aid to Employment in Sub-Saharan Africa
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-06-09) Hoogeveen, Johannes; Silva, Karishma; Hopper, Robert Benjamin
"Making Refugee Self-Reliance Work: From Aid to Employment in Sub-Saharan Africa" advocates for the enhancement of refugee self-reliance as a strategic, humane, development approach to refugee assistance. Facilitating refugees’ capacity to support themselves through gainful work not only upholds their dignity and autonomy but also offers socioeconomic benefits to host communities by unlocking opportunities for shared investment and development. The report demonstrates how refugee self-reliance in Sub-Saharan Africa remains elusive and identifies various reasons why this is the case: encampment limits the scope for self-reliance; restrictions on refugees’ right to work hinder self-sufficiency; small allocations of infertile land make even subsistence farming impossible; aid delivery in specific areas contributes to settlement patterns in which skills and economic opportunities do not match; economic development in remote, resource-scarce regions is unsustainable; and dependence on aid shifts funding priorities from long-term development to unproductive care and maintenance models. To overcome these challenges, the report outlines five areas for policy action: 1. Ending restrictive encampment policies 2. Boosting refugees’ economic participation 3. Supporting host communities 4. Reshaping financing and investment models 5. Investing in preparedness. Success requires committed leadership from host governments, as well as coordinated engagement and sustained support from humanitarian organizations and development partners.
Microdata Collection and Openness in the Middle East and North Africa: Introducing the MENA Microdata Access Indicator
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-12) Ekhator-Mobayode, Uche Eseosa; Hoogeveen, Johannes
This paper uses a “mystery client” approach and visits the websites of national statistical offices and international microdata libraries to assess whether foundational microdata sets for countries in the Middle East and North Africa region are collected, up to date, and made available to researchers. The focus is on population and economic censuses, price data and consumption, labor, health, and establishment surveys. Following the exercise, a new microdata access indicator that measures the degree of opennes of microdata and the ease with which microdata users can understand and navigate the websites of national statistical offices is presented. The results show that about half of the expected core data sets are being collected and that only a fraction is made available publicly. As a consequence, many summary statistics, including national accounts and welfare estimates, are outdated and of limited relevance to decision makers. Additional investments in microdata collection and publication of the data once collected are strongly advised. National statistical offices in the region should make considerable improvements to the outlook of their websites to make them more user friendly. Specifically, microdata libraries and updated survey calendars should be a standard feature of the websites to ensure easy access to available microdata.
Data Collection in Fragile States: Innovations from Africa and Beyond
(Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) Hoogeveen, Johannes; Pape, Utz; Hoogeveen, Johannes; Pape, Utz; Aguilera, Ana; Coulibaly, Mohamed; Eckman, Stephanie; Etang, Alvin; Gulzar, Saad; Himelein, Kristen; Isaqzadeh, Mohammad; Kaplan, Lennart; Katayama, Roy; Krishnan, Nandini; Mistiaen, Johan; Muñoz, Juan; Riva, Flavio Russo; Shapiro, Jacob; Sharma, Dhiraj; Taptué, Andre-Marie; Vishwanath, Tara; Walsh, James; Yama, Gervais Chamberlin
Fragile countries face a triple data challenge. Up-to-date information is needed to deal with rapidly changing circumstances and to design adequate responses. Yet, fragile countries are among the most data deprived, while collecting new information in such circumstances is very challenging. This open access book presents innovations in data collection developed with decision makers in fragile countries in mind. Looking at innovations in Africa from mobile phone surveys monitoring the Ebola crisis, to tracking displaced people in Mali, this collection highlights the challenges in data collection researchers face and how they can be overcome.
Can Public Works Enhance Welfare in Fragile Economies? The Londo Program in the Central African Republic
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-01) Alik-Lagrange, Arthur; Buehren, Niklas; Goldstein, Markus; Hoogeveen, Johannes
We evaluated the Londo public works program, which provided temporary employment and a bicycle to beneficiaries selected through public lotteries in the Central African Republic. The evaluation focused on the impacts of the program on households' welfare between 2 and 21 months after participation. We find that the program enhances the productivity of participants in a lasting way, with an approximate 10 percent increase in monthly earnings and a small impact on the number of days worked, well after they finished participating in the program. This improvement takes place through different channels for men, who intensify agricultural production and diversify in small manufacture activities, and women, who diversify into small trade activities. Londo increases the beneficiary households’ durable goods, such as furniture and cellphones, and productive assets, such as agricultural tools and livestock – thereby building household wealth. It also significantly improved their ability to cope with shocks. However, women coming from the poorest households experience much lower impacts on productivity and assets than men and women from less poor households, which indicates the need for specific provisions for widows and ultra-poor women in this type of intervention. The provision of bicycles increases mobility for male beneficiaries, but not for women, likely due to gender norms, risks and bike-riding skills, and other related constraints affecting women specifically.
Statistics Reform in Africa: Aligning Incentives with Results
(Taylor and Francis, 2019) Hoogeveen, Johannes; Nguyen, Nga Thi Viet
While there is a strong association between limited capacity and unavailability or production of low quality statistics in Africa, poor incentives are argued to be behind Africa’s statistical tragedy. The paper explores whether incentives of leaders and donors are aligned with the production of quality statistics and proposes six concrete ways to improve the current situation.
Mobile Phone Panel Surveys in Developing Countries: A Practical Guide for Microdata Collection
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2016-06-23) Hoogeveen, Johannes; Dabalen, Andrew; Mushi, Elvis; Etang, Alvin; Schipper, Youdi; von Engelhardt, Johannes
Household survey data are very useful for monitoring living conditions of citizens of any country. In developing countries, a lot of this data are collected through “traditional” face-to-face household surveys. Due to the remote and dispersed nature of many populations in developing countries, but also because of the complex nature of many survey questionnaires, collection of timely welfare data has often proved expensive and logistically challenging. Yet, there is a need for faster, cheaper to collect, lighter, more nimble data collection methods to address data gaps between big household surveys. The recent proliferation of mobile phone networks has opened new possibilities. By combining baseline data from a traditional household survey with subsequent interviews of selected respondents using mobile phones, this facilitates welfare monitoring and opinion polling almost real time. The purpose of this handbook is to contribute to the development of the new field of mobile phone data collection in developing countries. The handbook documents how this innovative approach to data collection works, its advantages and challenges. The handbook draws primarily from the authors’ first-hand experiences with mobile phone surveys in Africa and also benefits from experiences elsewhere. It is intended to serve a diverse audience including those involved in collecting (representative) data using mobile phones, and those using data collected through this approach. For those who will be implementing a mobile phone panel survey, the different chapters guide them through every stage of the implementation process. For potential users of the data collected via mobile phone technology, the handbook presents a new approach to data collection which they can use for monitoring programs and facilitate almost real time decision-making. A further purpose of this book is to contribute to the debate regarding the advantages of the method as well as the challenges associated with it.