A Joint Statement From Dale Buscher and Amy Slaughter

Announcement of Staff Transitions and Reflections on the Refugee Self-Reliance Initiative

A Joint Statement From Dale Buscher and Amy Slaughter

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At the genesis of the Refugee Self-Reliance Initiative (RSRI), 63 million people across the globe were forcibly displaced due to conflict and human rights abuses. Today, that number is 117 million and growing.

When we started this work, we recognized that the increasingly protracted nature of displacement and the growing numbers of people displaced necessitated doing things differently – that reliance on long-term care and maintenance programs where refugees are dependent on erratic humanitarian assistance was both undignified and unsustainable. Yet, during that pre-Global Compact on Refugees era, there was no shared objective around creating economic opportunities for refugees nor actively promoting self-reliance. Livelihood programs were often add-ons with little connection to market opportunities or knowledge generated about what was actually being achieved. In response, the Women’s Refugee Commission and RefugePoint began convening a Community of Practice with like-minded stakeholders to advance policies and programs in support of self-reliance opportunities and to create a measurement tool to gauge and amplify impact.

Building on prior tools developed by each of our agencies and enlisting the expertise of dozens of leaders in the field, our first undertaking was creating the Self-Reliance Index (SRI) to measure refugee households’ progress towards self-reliance over time. We knew the Index had to be simple, easy to administer, and only focused on the most vital information that would tell us most of what we needed to know to capture program impacts. We knew that it wasn’t just about jobs and income but also about how that income was used to support the well-being of household members. That is, if Mom or Dad were working, were the children more likely to be in school? Were household members more likely to be accessing needed health care and eating three meals a day?

As we both undergo career transitions—Dale is retiring, and Amy is shifting into independent consulting—we’d like to pause and reflect on how these nascent ideas evolved into the Refugee Self-Reliance Initiative and where the RSRI is today.

The two of us, along with Kellie Leeson, spent hours over many days and months wracking our brains around how to come up with ways to easily measure those things our collaborators deemed important. How do you determine if someone’s shelter is ‘appropriate’? If you’re trying to measure employment, what does it mean if someone works only part-time, seasonally, or on a sporadic, irregular basis? When we finally landed on a version we felt somewhat comfortable with, we piloted the SRI in three countries and worked with academic partners to undertake validity and reliability testing. The resultant learning led to modifications to the Index, with version 2.0 launching almost exactly four years ago.

In the intervening years, a lot has happened. We offered training on use of the Index, which led to the creation of online, e-learning modules available in four languages. We started a research learning group to pull together a research agenda and partners engaged in monitoring, testing, and evaluation. We created a steering committee and hired the RSRI’s first Executive Director, Kari Diener, who brought a strong vision for policy and practice reform and introduced elements of market systems development, climate action, and building capacity with refugee-led organizations.

We have been overwhelmed and surprised by the response to these efforts.

• Today, 65 partners are using the SRI to measure the impacts of their programs in 31 countries.

• 450+ individuals have joined the RSRI Community of Practice with 40+ member organizations regularly participating in our bi-monthly calls.

• We have collected data on over 30,000 households and have reached a collective 2 million refugees with social and economic inclusion programs through our partners.

• Donors have recommended the use of the SRI with their grantees.

• The SRI is being used in a variety of refugee and non-refugee contexts – with urban and camp-based refugees, IDPs, returnees, and host community members – in low, medium, and high-income countries.

• We are currently undertaking our first-ever rigorous evaluations utilizing the SRI.

• We are currently building an interactive, public dashboard that will display progress across SRI domains by country and globally.

With regular reports about cuts in food rations and reductions in humanitarian aid, promoting safe, sustainable livelihoods and assisting refugees to achieve self-reliance is more important than ever. We don’t want refugees to be dependent on inadequate assistance, but we also don’t want them cut off from humanitarian aid before they can sustainably meet their own needs, and we caution against appropriating the language of “self-reliance” in support of the latter. SRI data can be a key part of assessing when we can responsibly disengage households from assistance and ensure that refugees are not prematurely removed from humanitarian aid rolls. Good programming that captures progress on self-reliance can inform us about when the right time to re-channel assistance to those most in need is. In the coming years, we look forward to seeing additional progress in using data to identify what works best to facilitate self-reliance for refugees in various contexts and scaling those approaches broadly.

It’s been an amazing trajectory and a wonderful journey. We wish to thank all of the staff, consultants, advisors, funders, and RSRI stakeholders for moving this agenda forward. It has been a pleasure to work with and learn from you all. We hope this initiative continues to change responses to displacement, restore dignity, choice, and opportunity, and most importantly, help refugees rebuild their lives.

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Dale Buscher is the Vice President for Programs at the Women’s Refugee Commission. He is a co-founder of the Refugee Self-Reliance Initiative and the former chair of the RSRI Steering Committee.

Amy Slaughter is the Chief Strategy Officer at RefugePoint. She is a co-founder of the Refugee Self-Reliance Initiative and a technical advisor to the RSRI.

Madiha Ali Delivers NGO Statement About Self-Reliance at the Executive Committee of the High Commissioner’s Programme

On October 13, Madiha Ali, a dynamic refugee advocate and a member of the RSRI Steering Committee, delivered the NGO Statement for the general debate for the Executive Committee of the High Commissioner’s Programme (ExCom) in Geneva, Switzerland. The full written statement can be accessed here.

Madiha Ali, a dynamic refugee advocate (right) met Filippo Grandi, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees at the 73rd session of the Executive Committee of UNHCR this week in Geneva. Madiha is engaging on the world stage in policies and practices that matter to refugees – and her community – at the grassroots level. Today, Madiha will deliver one of only two civil society statements that will be presented at the Executive Committee of the High Commissioner’s Programme in Geneva, Switzerland.

The statement highlighted that at this time of unprecedented global displacement—with a staggering 100 million people who’ve been forced to flee their homes—refugee self-reliance models need to be the norm, rather than the exception when planning assistance and response to ongoing crises. It was one of only two civil society statements that were presented at ExCom, which is an annual meeting of the UNHCR attended by many member state delegations and civil society representatives. The RSRI is a global multi-stakeholder collaboration co-founded and hosted by RefugePoint that aims to reach five million refugees in five years with programming that puts them on a path to self-reliance and reshapes the humanitarian response paradigm away from emergency aid.

Global forced displacement is at its highest recorded, with over 30 million people who have fled their countries (and more than double that number displaced within their own country). Coupled with the extended length of displacement — often 20 or more years — and the lack of sustainable solutions for refugees — less than 3% return home annually — this growing global challenge is leaving increasing numbers of people living in limbo. Most refugees say they want to “stand on their own feet” — to take care of their own needs and those of their family. They request support to build independent lives in their new homes, whether their stay is temporary or permanent.

Self-reliance is recognized as a key solution to the global displacement crisis, with several recent high-level inter-governmental initiatives emphasizing the need to enhance self-reliance opportunities for refugees, including the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the 2018 Global Compact on Refugees. Despite this, the prevailing humanitarian response has focused on emergency aid. According to the former UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, this leaves millions of refugees “trapped in dependency on short-term aid that keeps them alive but falls short of ensuring their safety, dignity, and ability to thrive and be self-reliant over the long term.”

Self-reliance involves helping refugees to meet their own essential needs so that they can live in safety and dignity, without the need to rely on humanitarian aid. The statement will call out examples of self-reliance initiatives already being rolled out and will make policy recommendations targeting key stakeholders, including the UNHCR, member states, and humanitarian actors.

Now more than ever, we need long-term solutions for refugees. The statement that Madiha Ali delivered on October 13 highlighted the importance of self-reliance as one of these long-term solutions.

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This blog post was originally published on RefugePoint’s website. You can read the original post here.