Scenario planning for migration challenges

In 2018, Jester's Jeroen Toet and Linda Kaput travelled to the north of Uganda (East Africa) to train three districts and one municipality (local authorities) in the methodology of scenario planning. Uganda hosts more than a million refugees from Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The key question is whether the flow of refugees will continue, or whether it might decrease or even reverse in the future.

The north of Uganda was for a long time itself the scene of armed conflict, which has made it the poorest region in what is already one of the poorest countries in the world. Refugees are received hospitably, but the large numbers create all kinds of challenges. Some districts host as many refugees as residents, yet their budget is allocated only on the basis of the resident population.

Over a three-day training, around 20 participants per district learned the steps of the scenario process. Working from their own case, they developed compact scenarios and reflected on challenges and options. Without exception participants were enthusiastic about the method and grasped the concept quickly.

In the Netherlands, scenario planning is often used to weigh the relevance and the risks of a given option succeeding. In a development context it works differently. It is much more about the balance between large and small interventions and about choosing a number of options while looking for partners to take on the others. Even so, scenario planning is a valuable instrument for migration questions, precisely because they almost always carry a high degree of uncertainty.