ReliefWeb

NGO Statement on the Oral Update on the High Commissioner’s Dialogue on Protection Challenges

Year after year, the number of people who have been forcibly displaced due to conflict, violence, disasters, and climate change reaches a new, unprecedented scale – surpassing the previously “unprecedented” levels of the year prior. The 2022 Global Humanitarian Overview reported “record levels” of displacement, and in May, the number of forcibly displaced people globally exceeded 100 million, with the escalation of conflict in Ukraine tipping us towards this milestone.

Yet this issue extends beyond a matter of sheer magnitude. As crises grow more protracted in nature, refugees and internally displaced people (IDPs) are displaced for longer – 10 years on average – and many face a diminishing likelihood of returning home. Forcibly displaced people may also be living in increasingly fragile conditions, with 85% of the world’s refugees currently residing in lower-income countries. It is therefore clear that, as the systems and institutions in countries hosting displaced people are increasingly stretched, and as climate change, pandemics, and other dynamics add complexity to traditional humanitarian response, development-oriented approaches must be considered from the early stages to achieve real and lasting solutions.

We welcome UNHCR’s commitment to improving cooperation between humanitarian and development efforts in order to advance sustainable solutions for forcibly displaced persons, as reflected by the choice of this year’s theme for the High-Commissioner’s Dialogue on Protection Challenges and the emphasis on mainstreaming development engagement in UNHCR’s Strategic Directions 2022-2026. Broad commitments to developmentoriented approaches in the report of the UN Secretary General’s high-level panel on internal displacement and his Action Agenda on Internal Displacement are also encouraging.

Now we must look at how best to translate these commitments and policy priorities into concrete action, with clear and measurable targets. National and international NGOs, including refugee-led organisations, have a critical role to play in this endeavour. Working alongside UNHCR in many contexts of displacement, our collective experiences can not only shed light on past challenges and failures, but also draw lessons and identify opportunities. In this statement, we highlight four such challenges, all with inclusion at the centre:

• First, inclusion in societal structures

• Second, inclusion in decision-making

• And third, inclusion in the response

We also offer corresponding recommendations for how member states, UNHCR, and other aid actors can adopt more inclusive, development-oriented approaches in order to achieve stronger protection outcomes and better, more durable solutions for displaced people. To close, we offer a fourth challenge with a broader reflection on global allocation of resources, particularly in contexts where people have endured displacement for years or even decades.