About

RefugePoint was founded to help resettle and provide life-saving medical care to a group of HIV+ refugees. Later that year, we launched the Urban Refugee Protection Program to address the holistic needs of at-risk refugees. The program now provides support to 1,500 of Nairobi’s most vulnerable refugees and Kenyans annually.

In 2005, we made our first referral for resettlement, and in 2008 we began partnering with UNHCR to help more at-risk refugees access resettlement.

We worked with UNHCR to train over 20 non-governmental organizations (NGOs) across Africa on identifying refugees for resettlement. We later co-created a resettlement toolkit with UNHCR and partner NGOs to use globally.

We conducted our first child protection mission. Following its success to protect and help resettle unaccompanied children, we sent a team of Child Protection Experts to a number of locations to fill significant gaps, reach more children in need, and train others to do this work.

We began a program to recruit and hire refugee community health workers in Nairobi to serve people in their communities. These staff are best placed to discuss sensitive health issues and explain how to access local services.

We launched a livelihoods program to help urban refugees in Nairobi to achieve a higher level of self-reliance, and a better quality of life. We provide business training, grants, and other support to help refugees start or build small businesses.

We began guiding clients through our self-reliance runway model, assessing a client’s unique and individual needs along their journey to self-reliance.

In order to better influence global policy and practice, we established a permanent presence in Geneva, Switzerland, where we can amplify our voice in high-level policy conversations and share field-based knowledge and best practices with global partners.

Through our global partnership with UNHCR, we expanded our work beyond Africa to Malaysia, and later to Iraq, Turkey and Lebanon to enable refugees to safely relocate to more than a dozen countries around the world where they can rebuild their lives.

We worked with UNHCR to build what became the largest resettlement program in the world to evacuate unaccompanied minors and other refugees from dangerous detention centers in Libya, and find other refugees threatened by traffickers in Africa, and resettle them to countries in the European Union and North America.

In partnership with the Women’s Refugee Commission, we launched the Refugee Self-Reliance Initiative (RSRI) in order to expand self-reliance opportunities for refugees and build a global network of organizations, foundations, governments, and other partners focused on refugee self-reliance.

Together with Canadian partners, we launched the Economic Mobility Pathways Project, which aims to help qualified refugees in Kenya and the Middle East access immigration to Canada through work-based visas.

In collaboration with UNHCR and the International Refugee Assistance Project, we launched the Family Reunification Pilot Project, to help reunite unaccompanied and separated children with their family members in safe third countries.

As part of the Self Reliance Initiative and in collaboration with 25+ partnering NGOs, we launched the Self-Reliance Index (SRI), the first-ever global tool to measure the progress of a refugee household on its path to self-reliance.

As of November 2020, we had helped 87,503 refugees to access pathways to relocate to safety.

The first economic mobility candidates relocated to Canada through the Economic Mobility Pathways Project. RefugePoint partnered with UNHCR, Talent Beyond Boundaries, and the Canadian government to expand access to labor mobility, a new pathway to safety for refugees.

We deepened our direct engagement and support of community-based organizations (CBOs) serving refugees in Nairobi, Kenya. Recognizing the critical role that these organizations play as first responders in the community, we listened to, supported, and partnered with a group of refugee-led CBOs.

Following the Taliban takeover in Afghanistan, RefugePoint was among the founding partners for the Sponsor Circle Program for Afghans. The program allowed communities in the U.S. to welcome displaced Afghans by pairing refugee families with groups of Americans who committed to receiving them and received training to do so.

The RefugePoint Deployment Program grew both in size and geographic reach in 2022. We started the year with Experts working in 21 countries worldwide and ended with Experts working in 37 countries. In September, as part of this upscaling, we launched a Pilot Traineeship Program in collaboration with UNHCR to deploy experts in refugee resettlement around the world.

Family unity is a fundamental human right. In 2023, RefugePoint announced the launch of its Family Reunification Initiative, which is leading a global effort to help reunite 1 million separated refugees with their families over the next five years.

RefugePoint began supporting individuals to access lasting solutions in several countries we had not previously operated in, particularly in Latin America. Our new staff in Colombia supported 2,376 people during the quarter, most of whom had fled Venezuela.

RefugePoint staff led conversations at two of the most significant conferences in our field. The annual Consultations on Resettlement and Complementary Pathways brought together NGOs, UNHCR, States, and other actors working on resettlement, family reunification, labor mobility, and more. At the event, RefugePoint was one of three speakers in a plenary session on follow-up from the Global Refugee Forum. We used the opportunity to highlight the important role that refugee-led organizations can play as the foundation of support systems for many pathways to safety.