Conflict continues to displace millions across East Africa and the Great Lakes region, while climate shocks accelerate movement and undermine already fragile livelihoods. With over 25.1 million now displaced inside their countries and across borders, urban centres are absorbing growing populations under significant strain, even as public and aid financing tightens, and development finance becomes more selective and slower to reach the places most needed.
Many of the places facing the greatest displacement pressures remain the least able to access sustained development and climate financing, reinforcing cycles of fragility and protracted displacement. New conflicts in Ethiopia, Sudan, and the DR Congo have added millions more, while long-standing refugee camps remain difficult to move beyond. At the same time, even in IDP settings where people share legal rights with host populations, many are unable to exit displacement, highlighting the depth of the challenge.
For much of the past decade, ReDSS and many of our partners have made the case that if people are to move beyond prolonged precarity, they need more than humanitarian support. We know the changes required for the system to be more effective, legitimate and sustainable. This includes stronger local leadership, more direct and flexible financing, and greater accountability to affected communities and governments.
These conversations have shaped policy discussions for years, yet transformative change has often remained slower and more limited in practice. Ultimately, durable solutions depend on whether people can access rights, functioning local systems, economic opportunity, accountable institutions, and a meaningful say in the decisions that shape their lives.
Why Solutions Still Struggle to Last
Governments in the region have developed national durable solutions strategies and refugee inclusion has moved higher on policy agendas. Similarly, municipal and district actors are now more visible and regional institutions are engaging more actively. Development actors and financial institutions are more present than they were a decade ago. This progress cannot be underestimated.
But yet, solutions remain fragile. If the case for durable solutions has been accepted, why do durable solutions still feel so difficult to realize? Part of the answer is that the aid sector has often treated durable solutions as a separate agenda, sitting alongside humanitarian response, development, governance, and urban planning instead of allowing solutions thinking to fundamentally shape how all those systems work together.
Humanitarian and development actors continue to operate through different timelines, incentives, and financing structures. At local level, however, people experience displacement through shared pressures on housing, services, infrastructure, land and livelihoods. These rarely fit neatly within sectoral or status-based funding models. Across much of the region, municipalities are increasingly managing displacement in practice, even where policy and financing systems still treat displacement primarily as a humanitarian issue. Similarly, we still see that serious discussion around durable solutions begin too late, when displacement has already become prolonged. By then, humanitarian systems, local authorities, and communities are often already responding through overstretched and fragmented structures.
At a time when displacement dynamics, public systems, and aid financing models are all under growing strain, there is a need to rethink the next phase of solutions work more fundamentally. Durable solutions interventions cannot continue to operate as separate agendas with their own projects, coordination structures, and funding streams while the systems shaping displacement remain fragmented or under-supported.
They increasingly need to function as the connective tissue between governance, financing, climate adaptation, urban planning, and social inclusion efforts. This means:
Connecting refugee policy to labor markets
Ensuring municipal planning reflects population movement
Aligning return processes with realistic reintegration conditions
Strengthening the influence communities have over the decisions shaping their futures
These shifts may be less visible than launching new solutions programmes, but they are likely to matter far more in the years ahead.
Questions The Aid Sector Can No Longer Avoid
As a coalition of NGOs, ReDSS must also be willing to reflect honestly on our own role in this transition. NGOs, including our members, have become highly effective at delivering programmes in fragmented environments. We know how to respond quickly and deliver results under unfavorable conditions. These are valuable strengths especially when governments are absent or unwilling. But they are not sufficient for the period ahead.
We must ask harder questions of ourselves:
What functions should NGOs gradually stop owning if durable solutions are genuinely to become locally embedded?
Are we willing to share power with municipalities, local civil society, RLOs, and community structures whose ways of working may differ from our own?
Are our funding and operational models reinforcing the very fragmentation we often critique?
Are we measuring success by outputs delivered, or by whether systems become more inclusive, accountable, and capable over time?
And most importantly, are we ready for a future in which NGOs are less central because others are stronger?
These questions, which the aid sector is now grappling with, go to the heart of whether durable solutions become more resilient in a time of shrinking resources and rising need. While the aid system is far from consistently reflecting these approaches in practice, we do know what good practice looks like in relation to each of them and there is widespread acceptance of their importance. For example, many of them underpin the principles of the UN action agenda on IDPs and the Global Compact for Refugees.
Where ReDSS is Focusing its Efforts in 2026 and Beyond
It is in this context that ReDSS adopted a renewed Shared Agenda for 2025–2028. ReDSS remains grounded in the widely accepted understanding that durable solutions are achieved when displaced people no longer have protection and assistance needs linked to their displacement and are able to enjoy their rights without discrimination.
The Shared Agenda builds on this by focusing more explicitly on the political, social, economic, and institutional conditions that make these outcomes possible or prevent them from lasting. It focuses our coalition on four interconnected priorities:
Strengthening politically informed decision-making
Expanding equitable economic opportunities
Deepening social inclusion and participation
Supporting a more effective aid system that enables area-based and locally led responses
At its core, the Shared Agenda acknowledges that progress will depend on confronting the barriers that keep people trapped in displacement and the incentives/ disincentives that often work against long-term solutions. To ensure this agenda is credible, ReDSS has commissioned a Baseline Assessment to take stock of where durable solutions currently sit across the region and whether ReDSS itself is ready to deliver on these commitments. We are also investing in a Casebook of Promising Practice. At a time when many actors are being asked to do more with less, broad agreement on principles is no longer enough. We need clearer evidence of what has worked in practice, where assumptions still need to be challenged, and what can realistically be sustained or adapted across different contexts.
Looking ahead, these reflections are shaping where ReDSS is choosing to focus its energy and learning moving forward:
First, we are advancing a Community Accountability Framework and Participation Quality Index to help move the sector beyond superficial community accountability. We believe the next phase requires stronger accountability to displaced and host communities alike.
Second, we are deepening work on area-based financing. If solutions are to be sustained, financing must better reflect how people actually live in towns, in borderlands, and mixed communities where displacement intersects with wider development pressures. Funding models built only around sectors or legal categories will increasingly fall short.
Third, ReDSS is investing in the role of municipalities and urban actors in shaping more inclusive local responses through our partnership with Cities Alliance and the Mixed Migration Centre. Across the region, cities are increasingly where displacement futures are being shaped. If local authorities lack data, planning tools, financing pathways, or peer learning, national policy commitments alone cannot not deliver inclusion.
Fourth, we continue to promote Solutions from the Start in contexts such as Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where the risk is that today’s crises become tomorrow’s entrenched displacement situations if local systems, financing and inclusion are not considered early enough. In Somalia, this includes work on cyclical climate-induced displacement, where repeated shocks demand approaches that link early action, resilience, and long-term pathways.
This transition also requires stronger cross-regional learning and more grounded evidence on what durable solutions look like in practice across different contexts. Through our partnership with the Asia Displacement Solutions Platform (ADSP) and the Durable Solutions Platform (DSP) in the Middle East and North Africa, we are helping connect experiences across regions facing different but related displacement dynamics.
The years ahead are likely to be demanding. But the real challenge now is whether the way we work is helping local systems and communities become less dependent on aid over time.
