South Sudan reintegration and service capacity toolkit

Hundreds of refugee returnees queue to apply for their nationality certificates in Raja, South Sudan.

Measuring absorption capacity

The Absorption Capacity Toolkit is a practical resource developed to assess both the current quality of essential services and infrastructure in a given area, and their ability to absorb more demand as more people, such as returnees and displaced populations, arrive.

The goal is to help UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, and partners understand service gaps today and prepare for tomorrow's challenges by evaluating how well facilities can meet future population needs.

Key Methodology Components

Quality Assessment

Facilities (including health facilities, schools, water points) are scored to assess their current quality based on indicators like safety, availability of resources, and infrastructure condition. These scores provide an overview of how well each type of facility is functioning today. Facilities must meet basic minimum standards to be considered for absorption capacity calculations. Those that fall below these standards are flagged and the causes further investigated.

Absorption Capacity Assessment

We evaluate how well facilities can support additional demand by establishing different thresholds—ideal, strained, and maximum—based on the type of facility. The thresholds are used to estimate how many people each facility type (e.g., water points, health centers, schools) can serve, ensuring that even if the demand grows, service quality remains acceptable.

Regional Facility Mapping

The toolkit integrates mapping data from multiple sources to ensure a comprehensive understanding of the available infrastructure in each region. This approach allows us to account for unmapped facilities by using regional service capacity multipliers.

Service Capacity vs. Demand

Population data is used to determine the current regional demand for services, compared against the calculated service capacity. Data sources include up-to-date population estimates, with adjustments for school-age demographics for educational facility assessments.

Limitations and Considerations: The methodology acknowledges various assumptions and limitations, such as the homogeneous distribution of facilities and population demand. Care must be taken to interpret the results within local contexts, and additional insights from local experts can help fine-tune these assessments.

Measuring integration: the reintegration sustainability score (RSS)

The aim of the integration metric is to objectively assess the level of reintegration across different dimensions. This provides a standardized measure to compare progress across regions and over time. The integration metric applies weights to various indicators that represent each dimension of reintegration, including economic (food security, employment access, and financial stability), social (access to housing, healthcare, and education) and psychosocial (subjective well-being, including feelings of safety, community belonging, and support networks) dimensions. For practical implementation, each indicator score is calculated on a scale, where a higher score represents better outcomes for the returnee. These scores are then weighted and aggregated to determine both dimension-specific scores and an overall integration score. The scores range from 0 (no integration) to 1 (full integration), providing a quantifiable measure of the extent to which returnees are successfully reintegrating.

More detail in the downloadable resources: