Refugee vendors in Bujumbura’s central market, Burundi Photo: copyright UNHCR/B.Ntwari
Where do most refugees live? While about one-third of the world’s estimated 10.6 million refugees are in sprawling camps in remote rural areas, roughly another third live in cities. And their number is growing.
But most existing practices and guidelines for refugee protection and assistance have been developed for rural, camp-based settings rather than for urban areas. Accordingly, both governments and nongovernmental humanitarian agencies are giving increasing attention to “urban refugees” and their need for income, housing, education, health care, safety and dignity as they live among their host country’s citizens.
For its part, Church World Service has set out to document what fosters good refugee-host community relations, with the ultimate goal of recommending replicable “smart practices” that help strengthen assistance and protection for urban refugees. Its year-long research project “Neighbors in Need” is funded by the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration (PRM).
The provision of effective forms of protection and assistance to refugees living in complex urban environments presents a range of challenges and dilemmas to organizations like CWS. Logistically, it is often difficult to access refugee populations that may be dispersed across vast urban environments.
Urban refugee populations are often not recognized or registered by local authorities and deploy a range of “strategies of invisibility” to avoid detection and identification. In the absence of recognition and support, the livelihoods and local entitlements that urban refugees are able to secure depend, to some extent, on the relationships that they establish with the local population among whom they live.
These “host populations,” however, may be as poor, vulnerable and socially marginalized as the refugees, presenting both practical and ethical challenges to traditional “refugee-centric” forms of programming evolved in camp settings.
Building on some of the insights and policy objectives of UNHCR’s recent (2009) Policy on Urban Refugees, CWS’s “Neighbors in Need” research seeks to shed more light on the nature, and social and economic value of refugee-host community relationships in three urban environments:
- Jakarta, Indonesia, where, in partnership with UNHCR (the United Nations’ refugee agency), CWS provides material and social assistance to recognized urban refugees with temporary protected status and to a certain number of highly vulnerable asylum seekers. Indonesia counts 3,000 registered refugees and asylum seekers, at least 2,000 of them in Jakarta. Most are from Afghanistan, Sri Lanka and Iraq.
- Karachi and Peshawar, Pakistan. More than 1.7 million mostly Afghan refugees are registered in Pakistan, 130,000 of them in Karachi. CWS-Pakistan/Afghanistan has provided health services to Afghan refugees in Pakistan for some 30 years and has been operational in Pakistan for more than 50 years.
- Yaounde, Cameroon. Of nearly 92,000 registered refugees and asylum seekers in the country, about 10,000 live in Yaounde, where they have extremely limited access to basic needs such as health care, shelter, water and sanitation, despite a legal framework that provides refugees the same access to services as the host population. The UNHCR has identified improving protection and access for basic services by urban refugees in Cameroon as a priority area.
The results of the research project are expected to contribute towards improving CWS’s practice on a number of levels. In Pakistan and Indonesia, where CWS operates directly in providing assistance and protection services to urban areas that have been affected by displacement, this project will generate data that will contribute directly towards improving existing programs. At a more general level, the project will inform improvements to CWS’s approach to meeting the needs of refugees whose lives and futures are linked to the success of the communities within which they live.
A more detailed and nuanced understanding of refugee-host community relationships will inform a more inclusive approach to refugee programming that recognizes and builds on the understanding that positive outcomes for refugees may be linked, to some extent, on improved relationships with the host population.
CWS’s research team has been laying the groundwork for data collection, to take place during the first months of 2012.