Mae MacDonald

Graduate Student Research Funding | 2022 - 2023 Academic Year

What are the Effects of Employment Rights for Refugees and their Asylum Countries? The Case of Kenya
 

Since the 2000s, there has been an increasing focus on refugee ‘self-reliance’ and ‘local integration’ among the UNHCR and refugee advocates. However, we lack strong empirical evidence about the factors that determine whether work rights have a positive effect on refugees and their host communities in low and middle-income countries. In some contexts, work rights have improved refugee income and psychological well-being, as well as economic development in the host community. However, such rights may be less beneficial if cultural, linguistic, or resource barriers prevent refugees from gaining employment, or if labor market competition leads to conflict. This research examines the incoming 2021 Refugee Act in Kenya, which grants refugees the right to work. It seeks to determine the factors that improve integration outcomes for refugees from Somalia, South Sudan, and Democratic Republic of the Congo, as well as their Kenyan host communities.

Mae MacDonald, Department of Political Science

Mae MacDonald is a political science PhD student and Knight-Hennessy Scholar at Stanford University. Her research focuses on refugee accommodation in low- and middle-income countries using causal inference techniques, field-based qualitative interviews, and machine learning. MacDonald is a graduate fellow at the Immigration Policy Lab, a Stanford Impact Labs Fellow, and a Stanford Enhancing Diversity in Graduate Education Doctoral Fellow. She has conducted fieldwork in Kenya, Uganda, and Thailand, and her research has been supported by the King Center on Global Development and the Institute for Research in the Social Sciences, among others. 

Prior to graduate school, MacDonald worked with refugees in Greece and the U.K. with Movement on the Ground, CalAid, and The Entrepreneurial Refugee Network, and was a researcher at YouGov, where she conducted mixed methods research for the U.K. government and public sector organizations such as Amnesty International and Stonewall. MacDonald graduated from the University of Oxford with a first-class bachelor’s degree in philosophy, politics and economics, where she was a Crankstart Scholar (FLI) and Christ Church E. T. Warner Prize recipient.

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