Updated October 2026: this post brings together five posts from late 2019 on our preparations for the first Global Refugee Forum: an engagement paper, a special update, our key messages for Ethiopia, our briefing paper and our pledges. We have expanded it with a summary drawn from those documents.
The Global Refugee Forum, held every four years from 2019, is the main event for driving progress on the objectives of the Global Compact on Refugees. The first took place in Geneva on 17 and 18 December 2019, co-hosted by UNHCR and Switzerland and co-convened by Ethiopia, Turkey, Germany, Costa Rica and Pakistan. States and other stakeholders, including civil society, were invited to make pledges, individual, joint or matching, across six areas: burden and responsibility sharing, education, jobs and livelihoods, energy and infrastructure, solutions, and protection capacity. For East Africa, where the Comprehensive Refugee Response Framework (CRRF) had been the main frame for refugee policy since 2016, the forum was a chance to take stock of what had changed and to push for longer-term responses.
Preparing civil society to engage
In August 2019 we published a paper on how civil society could engage strategically. It suggested advocating with authorities for preparations that involved many stakeholders and built on existing coordination structures; using our networks to support the meaningful participation of refugees and host communities in consultations; using events such as IGAD’s second ministerial stocktaking meeting on the Nairobi Declaration to review CRRF implementation with evidence; supporting governments to develop measurable pledges based on existing plans; considering joint pledges with donors, international organisations and development actors; and documenting good practice from members and partners for submission to UNHCR. A special update in October 2019 shared progress on preparations and on the IGAD meeting.
Key messages for Ethiopia
In November 2019, with our members, we developed key messages to support participation in the Government of Ethiopia’s consultations ahead of the forum. The document aimed to help align messaging to government and to encourage joint pledges, without advocating specific ones. It set out five messages: implement the February 2019 Refugee Proclamation through the regulations and directives it still required, including on out-of-camp policy and economic engagement; finalise and formally adopt the ten-year National Comprehensive Refugee Response Strategy; invest in a government-led coordination structure accepted across government; develop area-based action plans led by local authorities with displacement-affected communities, building on promising signs in Somali Regional State; and design a new financing instrument for Ethiopia under the Global Compact within 12 to 24 months, with World Bank technical support.
What the CRRF had taught the region
Our December 2019 briefing paper documented learning from applying the CRRF in Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia and at regional level through IGAD, based on a document review, 25 key informant interviews and our participation in preparatory meetings. On return and (re)integration, it found that the regional focus had shifted from return movements towards durable solutions in host countries, that housing, land and property support was increasingly seen as central, and that livelihoods programming was moving towards market systems. But there was little monitoring of returnees once return packages ended, and no common agreement on how to measure (re)integration. On area-based and locally led approaches, area-based coordination was emerging under municipal leadership, with refugees included in the Garissa and Turkana county development plans for 2018 to 2022 and community action plans feeding district plans in Baidoa and Kismayo. Yet accountability to communities remained weak, localisation commitments were unmet, and private sector engagement lagged. On national and regional engagement, IGAD had changed the regional conversation, but regional commitments were not consistently translated into national policy or implementation, and the predictable long-term development financing the CRRF assumed had not materialised.
The paper recommends common standards for measuring sustainable (re)integration; a shared case for cross-border programming; investment in institutions rather than individual secondments; consistent engagement of displaced communities at every programme stage; coordinated policy asks to governments, using new financing such as the World Bank’s IDA19 refugee window; continued support to IGAD’s stocktaking; and linking durable solutions contributions to the Sustainable Development Goals.
Our four pledges
ReDSS submitted a joint pledge with 14 civil society organisations, covering Ethiopia, Somalia and Kenya, to be reviewed at the first mid-term senior officials meeting in 2021 and monitored annually. The four commitments were: to invest at sub-national level in durable solutions working groups or local solutions hubs that link programming to district development plans; to develop multi-stakeholder approaches to measuring durable solutions processes and strengthen accountability for collective outcomes; to rethink the displacement financing architecture to support early and long-term solutions for displaced and host communities; and to support regional approaches with IGAD and its Regional Support Platform, and similar work in the Great Lakes with the International Conference on the Great Lakes Region.
Read the civil society engagement paper, the October 2019 special update, the briefing paper, the pledge document and the Ethiopia key messages.
References
ReDSS (2019). Advancing multi-stakeholder engagement to sustain solutions: briefing paper for the Global Refugee Forum. December 2019. https://www.regionaldss.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/ReDSS_GRF_BRIEF_Interactive.pdf
ReDSS (2019). Global Refugee Forum: overview, opportunities and suggestions for civil society engagement. 27 August 2019. https://www.regionaldss.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/ReDSS_GRF_overview_opportunities_final_27August19.pdf
ReDSS (2019). Global Refugee Forum pledge. November 2019. https://www.regionaldss.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/ReDSS_GRFPledge_extracted_Nov19.pdf
ReDSS (2019). ReDSS Ethiopia: Global Refugee Forum preparations, key messages. November 2019. https://www.regionaldss.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/ReDSS-Ethiopia_GRFpreparations_keymessages_updated.pdf
