The Pact for the Future: What does it mean for our work and to forced displacement?

Mon, Oct 28, 2024

In this issue of our quarterly advocacy blog, we want to briefly unpack some key features of the newly adopted international consensus document, the Pact for the Future, that was adopted by the UN General Assembly on 22-23 September 2024. We also make some observations on its impact on the future of advocacy in relation to forced displacement

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Realpolitik In Aid

Thu, Sep 19, 2024

For over 20 years an organisation called InterAid was the main implementation partner for the most significant refugee response contracts in Kampala Uganda. All public funding allocated towards Education for refugees in Kampala, for example, found its way to InterAid. They were responsible for running education programmes in urban areas such as supporting schools with funds and learning resources, identifying out-of-school children, especially primary aged children, and training teachers. The problem was that InterAid did barely anything. According to all the schools we visited the funds were not being spent on anything related to refugee education or much else related to refugees. Eventually, after well over 20 years this became a more public fact and they had all their funding cut, and soon after the organisation folded.

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Brands And The Corporatisation of NGOs

Mon, Aug 12, 2024

Of the $46 billion given in humanitarian aid, only 1.2% is put in the hands of local actors and far less is put in the hands of leaders from communities affected by forced displacement. (HPG, November 2023) When donors choose to give, be they tax payer funded donor agencies, private philanthropic agencies or individual donors, they are largely giving to institutions from the global north that they know. Within this statement we should read that they are giving to organisations that they “trust”.

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Neocolonialism Through Due Diligence. The Price of Depending on Imperialist Institutions for Brokering Trust

Thu, Aug 1, 2024

Global crises fuelling the displacement and protracted emergencies for increasingly vast populations around the world is the result, for a large part, of global inequalities and the perpetuation of inter-continental and intergenerational injustices. Reallocation of unjustly concentrated resources and a shift in power in the way we collectively deal with the world’s problems is needed urgently. Unless we reverse the trend of increasing inequality in the world, there will continue to be ever more millions of refugees. But “aid” can be done badly - even so badly as to create more harm than good, and at times or perpetuating the problems supposedly being addressed.

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