The World Bank recently released a report on the cost effectiveness of job projects in six nations witnessing conflict and/or forced displacements, namely Iraq, Jordan, Kenya, Lebanon, Mali and South Sudan. The data was collected from 109 interventions from 3 major agencies, namely the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO), the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the World Bank over the ten year period extending between the years 2009 and 2019. The intervention, and which serves as a unit of study for this study, consists of the set of services provided to a distinct group of beneficiaries. Said services were divided into six groups as highlighted below:

-    Training: Transferring skills and knowledge to participants and thus making it easier for them to find jobs

-    Job Matching: Connecting job seekers to employers

-    Economic Inclusion: Securing some consumption needs for those in poverty in order to increase their productivity.

-   Capital Support and Access to Finance: Providing businesses and startups with access to funding (whether in kind or cash) in the form of a grant or loan with the ultimate aim of boosting productivity.

-  Public Works: Providing short-term employment to impoverished households in building labor intensive infrastructure

-     Market Systems: Removing inefficiencies in a value chain in order to boost productivity.

In details, the study analyzes two cost aspects related to said projects namely cost-efficiency (which tackles how well inputs are converted into outputs) and cost effectiveness (which analyzes whether the spending resulted in the achievement of the desired outcomes). As discussed earlier, the study discussed 109 interventions with the bulk (~57) of the interventions being provided by the World Bank, followed by the FCDO (26 interventions) and the UNHCR (21 interventions). As for the destination countries for these interventions, Kenya accounted for more than one-third of the total number (40 interventions), followed by Jordan (16 interventions), each of Lebanon, Iraq and South Sudan (15 interventions) and Mali (8 interventions). In the case of Lebanon, eight interventions (more than 50% of the provided interventions) were directed towards forcibly displaced persons and host communities. The analysis concluded that value chain projects are the costliest on a per beneficiary basis, standing at $122,450 per firm in Lebanon (intervention in the solid waste management industry) given the complexity of such interventions. Then came the programs that provide pure access to finance ($56,036 per firm in the case for Lebanon), while the least costly were the financing and business support services (cost per firm ranged between $9,031 and $37,350 in the case of Lebanon). The reason behind this difference according to the report is that business support services are typically extended to small-scale firms whereas interventions that only provide capital financing (grant or loans) are likely towards mature firms that have much higher financing needs. Overall (and when including all six countries), the median cost per firm for value chain interventions stood at $137,798 followed by capital support and access to finance ($32,516) and capital support and access to finance & business support services ($19,216).