Updated October 2026: this post was first published in February 2020 to share our 2019 annual report. We have expanded it with a summary drawn from the report.
2019 ended with the first Global Refugee Forum, and for East Africa and the Horn of Africa it was a year to take stock of how responses to displacement were changing. The region offers much to build on, adapt and replicate elsewhere. Across the region, the focus was shifting from return movements towards durable solutions for refugees and internally displaced people where they live, visible in consortia that bring humanitarian, development and resilience actors together and in more consistent engagement from development partners such as the World Bank. There were innovative longer-term approaches to housing, land and property, self-reliance and integrated programming for host and displaced communities, and new coordination structures at local and municipal level, where participatory area-based approaches led by local governments were emerging. Regional actors, IGAD in particular, changed the regional conversation on durable solutions and brought governments together around a common agenda.
Building skills
Our learning events reached 779 participants (531 men and 248 women) from more than 140 organisations, double the 2018 figure. We trained 236 practitioners and policymakers, including 84 national actors, twice as many national actors as in 2018, through six technical trainings in Kenya, Somalia, Somaliland, Ethiopia and Afghanistan. Seven operational workshops in Baidoa, Kismayo and Mogadishu brought together 145 practitioners and policymakers, and our first regional programme learning workshop had 112 participants. Women’s participation across trainings, events and workshops rose to 296, from 171 in 2018.
Evidence and policy
We produced two operational research pieces, a solutions analysis, a lessons-learnt piece with three case studies, six in-depth qualitative case studies, a briefing paper, six one-pagers and four key messaging briefs. Our first annual aspirations survey reached 658 host community and 1,352 displaced households in Somalia. The report records 30 operational partners, authorities and research institutions using ReDSS evidence. We supported IGAD’s Kampala Declaration on jobs, livelihoods and self-reliance, helped prepare Somalia’s four pledges for the Global Refugee Forum and supported national engagement in Ethiopia and Kenya, and contributed to a Dadaab solutions paper and a briefing on Kenya’s Refugee Bill. The Federal Government of Somalia endorsed and adopted our durable solutions programming principles, and we supported harmonised approaches across five consortia in Somalia. By the end of the year ReDSS had 14 member NGOs and a team of 11 across the regional, Kenya, Ethiopia and Somalia units, double its 2018 size.
Looking ahead to 2020
As we looked ahead, the year pointed us towards strengthening common standards for measuring sustainable (re)integration, which actors across the region still lacked, and towards a common research agenda in Somalia and Kenya so that studies build on each other. It pointed us towards stronger uptake of our evidence, with dissemination plans for each study, more visual and translated materials, and information products such as our online dashboard kept consistently up to date. It also pointed us towards widening ownership of policy dialogue so that local civil society takes part alongside national governments, and highlighted the need for predictable, long-term financing for refugee-hosting states. Our plans included social cohesion training with the Danish Demining Group, a workshop on housing and integrated settlements in Somalia, an IDP strategy for Ethiopia, an advanced area-based planning module piloted in Jigjiga, evidence weeks in Ethiopia and Kenya, and a research paper one year after the Global Refugee Forum. This will enable ReDSS to turn a growing body of evidence into shared standards and practice.
Our work was made possible by our members and by funding from UK DFID, the European Union, ECHO and Danida. Read the 2019 annual report and the summary presentation.
References
ReDSS (2020). Annual report 2019. https://www.regionaldss.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/2019-Final-Annual-report.pdf
