There are more refugees in the world now than ever before in recorded history. They exhibit extraordinary resilience and resourcefulness in dealing with challenges most of us would fear to face. And yet the international community is barely tapping into their collective wisdom.
According to UN estimates, 117.2 million people are forcibly displaced or stateless worldwide, nearly 30 million of them refugees, having fled their homes because of protracted crises from Syria to Ukraine, Afghanistan to Israel and the Gaza Strip.
World leaders will gather in Geneva next week for the world’s largest international meeting on refugees, the Global Refugee Forum. The last GRF, in 2019, was disappointing. Not only were financial commitments inadequate and often vague, far too little space was given to refugee leadership. Fewer than 2 percent of attendees were refugees, leaving those most impacted by decisions on the outside looking in.
Progress since 2019 has been slow at best. A recent, highly sobering report from ODI and Development Initiatives (DI), independent global affairs think tanks, showed a widespread failure to properly fund the refugee-led organizations (RLOs) doing some of the most important and effective work on the front lines of these crises. RLOs have deep experience with the problems facing their own communities and expertise on what works and what doesn’t. Supporting these organizations should be a central component of any lasting solution and, critically, it can help grow the refugee community’s own political and economic power.
But current funding to RLOs is dangerously low. In 2022, when $6.4 billion was provided to UN-coordinated refugee response plans, RLOs received only $26.4 million in humanitarian and development assistance, according to the ODI report. None of the government donors contacted for the report could even produce data on their funding to RLOs in 2022, and few tracked how or whether their large international partners passed on funding to such groups. UN agencies were not tracking this information either, nor were over half of private foundations.
My organization, the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation, gave $2.64 million directly to RLOs in 2022, plus another $2.65 million to NGOs that passed on nearly all that funding to RLOs. While we’re proud of this, we’re alarmed to see that it accounts for 46 percent of the total trackable dollars supporting RLOs. We need far better accounting and transparency around RLO funding to learn just how deep this funding crisis runs.
The GRF has to take some big swings at reorienting how we lift refugee leadership, support refugee-led organizations, and better resource refugees overall. Here’s how the GRF can make progress this month and reboot a more dynamic global conversation around refugees:
First, we need organizers to move from rhetoric to action on meaningful participation of refugees. An expected 100 refugees will be in attendance this year, which is an improvement from 2019 but not nearly enough given thousands of people will attend. Organizers can still plan to have refugees included on every panel on the agenda – ensuring a real voice, not tokenism. Ahead of the GRF, more NGO advocacy experts can join efforts underway to train refugee leaders on how to influence policymakers. At the forum, participants should have the tough conversations needed around why refugees are still only a small fraction of the participants and how to increase refugee leaders’ role in decision-making.
Second, the multilateral development banks at the core of financing this response need to use the forum – and their evolution process – as a moment to double down on their support. The World Bank and Inter-American Development Bank should pledge to increase their funding. Other banks, like the African Development Bank, should announce plans to join with similar investments. Just as importantly, all multilateral banks need to commit to more transparency about what’s informing their funding and policy decisions and to giving refugees a meaningful voice in that decision-making. The UN Refugee Agency, which has supported the banks’ approaches, can help with this.
Third, it comes down to how and where dollars are allocated. Donor government funding directly and through NGO partners needs to increase dramatically, and this funding needs to be tracked. GRF convenors should make the ODI/DI report central to the forum and encourage discussions and commitments around overcoming barriers to funding them. Especially in an environment where aid is limited, less of the overall refugee budget should go to UN agencies to implement programs, which have a high transaction cost, and more should go to RLOs that can deliver effectively for their communities.
These steps should be seen as the starting point, launching a new and bold approach to how we fund meaningful solutions for refugees. We are far past due for a wholly new global framework for how the world invests in refugees. Old ways of working, debated and discussed at a GRF every four years, are no longer sufficient to make real progress for refugees. We need to think big and differently about solutions fit for today’s refugee crisis.
Sarah Smith leads the Homelessness, Refugees, and Safe Water Initiatives, as well as the Disaster and Program-Related Investments for the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation.
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