By Amy Slaughter, Former Chief Strategy Officer
The core of RefugePoint’s work, as captured in our mission statement, is finding and expanding solutions for refugees. But what exactly are “solutions”?
The term “solutions” has a precise meaning in our field of work. With this blog and graphic, we explain why we focus on solutions for refugees, what exactly that means, where we sit in the refugee response continuum, and how that differentiates us from other organizations.
The Three Main Phases of Work in Refugee Response
One can think of refugee response in much the same way as other emergency response or disaster management efforts. That is, there are three main buckets or phases of work:
- Prevention: preventing bad things from happening
- Response: mitigating the negative effects when we can’t prevent them
- Recovery: recovering from them and restoring normalcy as much as possible
In the refugee response field, these buckets are typically referred to as:
- Root Causes (prevention)
- Assistance and Protection (response)
- Solutions (recovery) (RefugePoint’s area of expertise)
These buckets align closely (though not perfectly) with the three geographies of refugee response:
- Country of Origin: A refugee’s home country from which they fled
- Country of Asylum: The country in which a refugee first seeks safety or “asylum”
- Third Country: A possible third country to which a refugee may be permanently relocated
Root Causes
Linking the buckets of work with these geographies, the work of prevention, or addressing “root causes of displacement,” takes place in the Country of Origin (a refugee’s home country). This might consist of conflict resolution, economic development, strengthening the rule of law and respect for human and minority rights, etc. These activities help stabilize countries, ideally preventing violence and persecution that may force citizens from their homes. This is extremely important work undertaken by many respected agencies, but it is not work that RefugePoint has chosen to take on.
Assistance and Protection
The work of response, or “assistance and protection,” maps neatly onto Countries of Asylum (the country in which a refugee first seeks safety). After refugees flee their Countries of Origin and seek safety in another country, they often need emergency shelter, basic needs support, legal assistance, and protection from refoulement (forcible return to the Country of Origin). This is extremely important work undertaken by many respected agencies, but RefugePoint only takes it on in a limited and targeted capacity.
Solutions (RefugePoint’s area of expertise)
Finally, recovery or “solutions” is a bit trickier because it maps against all three of the geographies of refugee response. When people are forced to flee their home countries, there are three potential options: they can go back home, stay where they are, or go somewhere else. These options, in UN language, are:
- Repatriation to the Country of Origin
- Local integration in the Country of Asylum
- Resettlement to a Third Country
These options are called “durable solutions,” or simply “solutions,” because they permanently resolve an individual’s refugee status. Becoming a refugee means losing the protection of your home country government – that is, the set of rights and benefits that at least theoretically accrue to citizenship. Refugees enter a space of legal limbo in which they are waiting to gain the protection of a new state. “Durable solutions” means resolving the legal limbo and reacquiring state protection.
This is what we mean when we say we focus on solutions. We don’t address root causes of displacement. We don’t focus on providing assistance or protection. What RefugePoint specializes in is helping refugees find permanent solutions to restore their legal rights and normalcy to the degree possible, allowing them to not only survive but thrive. Not many agencies work in this highly specialized niche within the very broad refugee response continuum.
Only a tiny fraction of the total global humanitarian aid budget goes toward durable solutions for refugees. The vast majority of aid goes toward emergency and basic needs assistance. Currently, fewer than 3% of refugees globally find durable solutions each year. As displacement numbers grow and crises become more protracted, the need for such solutions only increases. Many refugees are waiting in limbo for decades.
Our Unique Value Proposition: Focusing on Local Integration and Resettlement
Of the three durable solutions outlined by UNHCR (repatriation, local integration, and resettlement), RefugePoint works on the second two: local integration and resettlement. We do not work on voluntary repatriation because that requires a different set of skills, knowledge and relationships than we have – focused on peace-building and reintegration in the Country of Origin.
Our unique value proposition is instead to work in Countries of Asylum around:
- Identifying refugees in need of resettlement or other permanent, legal relocation pathways to Third Countries and connecting them with those opportunities or building new pathways where they don’t exist.
- Building steps toward local integration in Countries of Asylum. Our self-reliance program in Nairobi is a major stepping stone in that direction. This is the context in which we provide targeted assistance and protection – in our holistic approach of promoting social and economic inclusion for refugees while working toward the durable solution of legal, local integration.
Our role as an NGO
Ultimately, only governments can decide whether to offer legal protection to refugees, such as through permanent residency, a path to citizenship and full economic and social rights. As an NGO, our role is to advocate for such protections to be extended to more refugees, to design programs that connect the most vulnerable and at-risk refugees with these opportunities, and to facilitate the steps in between.
Why We Narrow Our Focus on the “Solutions” Space
We believe that we are stronger and more effective by narrowing our focus to the “solutions” space, rather than trying to take on the breadth of interventions needed by refugees throughout the displacement cycle. We have close relationships with the organizations that provide these other services and we often refer refugees to them for specific types of assistance. However, we’ve become known for our expertise and excellence around solutions and are looked to as a leader in that phase of the refugee response continuum.
We are often asked, as an NGO with its roots in both Kenya and the United States, why we don’t engage in the work of reception and integration of resettled refugees in the U.S. These are the reasons. We have strategically carved our mission around addressing the most critical gaps that we see in the refugee response system. In our experience, while there’s room to improve everywhere, the largest gaps are not in the U.S. where a robust civil society effort and public-private partnership already exist to assist resettled refugees, but rather in the low and middle income countries that host 75% of the world’s refugees.