Economic Integration of Migrants and Refugees in Egypt

Egypt now hosts one of the largest refugee and migrant populations in the region, nearly nine million people, with roughly 80% coming from Sudan, Syria, Yemen, Palestine, and Libya, and this report, produced with Flat6Labs, asks how these communities are actually building lives here. It widens an earlier, Sudan-focused diagnostic into a fuller picture, from Syrian entrepreneurs who have visibly reshaped Cairo's food and retail scene to Yemeni and Libyan communities leaning on trade and mutual aid networks to get by. Drawing on a shared dataset of over 8,000 survey data points, it follows five running threads: entrepreneurship, portable skills, informality, diaspora networks, and how migrants are framed in policy, and tests them against international models from Uganda, Jordan, and Morocco. Its case is that Egypt's new Asylum and Labor Laws are a real opening to move refugees from humanitarian dependence into the formal economy.