The Need and Opportunity for Refugee Led Aggregation Initiatives

The first refugee-led organisation network that Cohere was involved with was called the Refugee Grassroots Network, a small group of refugee-led organisations (RLOs) based in Kampala, which was founded in 2012 and operated until around three years later. The main aim of the group was for RLOs in Kampala to swap notes, share ideas, build networks, and support small emerging groups as they started out. This was likely one of the first RLO networks in the world. Nowadays, aggregation initiatives led by refugees serve multiple important functions. Momentum has been growing and there are now hundreds of refugee led aggregation initiatives. It is important as a sector that we recognise the diverse functions and purposes of such RLO networks, and ensure that RLO leaders and network secretariats are supported in building these coalitions and in sustaining collaboration, often across international borders. It is also important that we accommodate a broad church of different aggregation initiatives.

The Need and Opportunity for Refugee Led Aggregation Initiatives

There are now thousands of refugee led organisations (RLOs) meeting the needs and ambitions of their community members around the world. In Uganda alone there are 126 RLOs with profiles on Reframe (with an estimated 1000+ in total in the country). The increased number of RLOs has not made a big difference in redirecting the flow of humanitarian aid to refugee-led initiatives leaders. Refugee-led organisations currently receive less than 1% of funding allocated to refugee responses and despite their crucial work they are typically only given a peripheral role within the coordinated response by the international aid system.

There is an urgent need to change this. A refugee response that is led by people affected by forced displacement is the most effective and appropriate means of achieving change. The current system is under extreme threat, and with numbers of forcibly displaced people increasing every year, the response to refugee crises will fail unless new approaches are tested and scaled. Aggregation initiatives offer an example of a new approach - through a network, a refugee led approach can be scaled while still maintaining the vital characteristics of a nuanced localised response.

One of the reasons the amount of funding reaching RLOs is so paltry is that there is only a small number of donors explicitly committed to providing funding to RLOs (22 identified by ODI in 2023 providing $26 million in funding between them) . There is a crucial need to increase the number of donors funding RLOs. As it stands, it is not possible for the low number of donor offices with small dedicated teams to sustain direct funding partnerships with hundreds or thousands of RLOs. There is a need for as many entities as possible that can act as intermediaries connecting RLOs to donors and as far as possible these intermediaries should themselves be led by communities affected by forced displacement. While the amount of RLO networks has been increasing there are still not enough initiatives in existence to adequately connect the donors to the projects on the ground. This is partly why Cohere has continued to play this role in Africa while we identify and elevate systems change innovations that can help us step away from this intermediary role.

For this reason, the sector needs to create an ecosystem that enables more, not fewer, refugee aggregation initiatives to thrive. It would be an own-goal to limit our imaginations as to what aggregation initiatives can look like, or to suggest that only limited categories of networks are legitimate. The Global Refugee Led Network, for example, with its national level RELONs and regional level chapters plays a crucial role in channelling the flow of information as well as in some cases funding, advocacy messaging and expertise back and forth from the local level to the international stage. This should not mean that other networks that exist within parallel structures lack legitimacy or should not be credited as representing the communities they are working for. Other aggregation initiatives, such as RLO consortia, advocacy coalitions, thematically focused working groups (such as RLOs working in agriculture), and settlement level coordination initiatives can and should be supported as working in tandem with a network structure that is more pyramidic in structure such as the GRN.

Myths and Concerns around “Representation”

The justification from the international community for pressuring RLOs into hierarchical structures is based on the supposed idea that this way it will be easier for RLOs to select candidates to represent them in international and national level humanitarian forums. This pressure is concerning because it demonstrates a resistance to opening accessibility to these decision making forums to more than the minimum number of refugee leaders - often only one refugee leader representing a hierarchically structured network is invited to forums and spaces.

This needs to change. This perspective on “representation” can be criticised from three major angles. Firstly, the expectation for all RLOs to aggregate into one legitimate network is not a standard that is demanded of iNGOs, for whom just operating in a displacement context typically gives them automatic access to the highest levels of humanitarian decision making. (Cohere, despite being a small NGO, has been invited to attend the Country Directors monthly meetings for many years, while RLO leaders have been explicitly denied the same access.) Secondly, having one representative from refugee leaders liaising or negotiating with a large number of international actors is not a balanced representation and it is certainly not inclusive to the wide array of voices they are unfairly expected to represent. Thirdly, while applying this pressure to select one voice, the international community has been ignorant of the obvious political tensions imposed upon a group of RLOs who previously had worked together very productively. The “Do No Harm” principle is clearly being tested when we apply such pressures without considering the consequences.

Outside of the question of representation, we need to open our imaginations further when looking at the additional opportunities and functions offered by refugee led aggregation. True to form, the international community has perceived the aggregation of RLOs through the lens of their own agenda. As a result, RLO networks have been pressured towards serving functions that benefit donors and intermediaries, such as capacity building for emerging RLOs and last mile distribution of funding. While capacity building and fiscal sponsorship are valid and important functions for RLO aggregation initiatives, there are networks with other visions that might not, and should not have to, necessarily serve the donors most urgent pressing needs, but that nonetheless offer radical shifts to the status quo narrative.

An example of this would be the five RLOs Cohere is partnering who are collectively sharing their impact in delivering basic formal education. This initiative is not an example of trying to meet the most urgent needs of donors, but an example of demonstrating how refugee-led aggregation can, over time, bring a refugee-led response into the mainstream of the global response to forced displacement. The RLOs profiled on this page, are educating a total of 2071 children in registered formal schools in forced displacement contexts and are positioning themselves to play a much bigger role in delivering education for refugees. This includes, hopefully before long, taking on the implementing partnerships of the core channels of refugee funding such as via UNHCR and government donor agencies. In the meantime, this initiative is helping to change donor behaviours because through the collective change profile, we and the five RLO partners are encouraging donors to give flexible, unrestricted funding based on the evidence they are seeing, rather than giving funding that is attached to conditions and criteria of delivery in the future. This will not only ensure that funding is more efficient, as bureaucratic reporting requirements are heavily reduced, but more importantly, it ensures that the funding relationships are more equitable as donors choose to give to RLOs based on a results framework and a vision that is set by refugee communities as opposed to by the donor.

Another instance lies in the networks we’ve recently begun collaborating with, which are pioneering innovative approaches to fostering collaboration and connections within their memberships. An example of this is an up-and-coming network of women led RLOs in East Africa. Rather than relying on exhaustive paper trails emphasising due diligence and administrative risk mitigation, these networks prioritise values over documentation. They place a premium on cultivating trust and connections, valuing these aspects above contractual obligations, “terms of reference”, and bureaucratic formalities. As such, these networks offer a genuine bridge of trust between donors and the individual RLO members, as well as their community members. This stands in contrast to a model whereby networks are pressured into offering a due diligence process which may appear to some donors to replace the important work of trust building, but instead acts only as a facade to the real trust building, or worse, provides an inaccurate depiction of the web of connections that donors believe themselves to be part of.

These networks are still in the early stages and feel up against pressure from all angles to conform to what the aid sector expects of them. They have donors asking for documentation for every downstream transaction- requests so thorough that one wonders why the donors didn’t just give to the individual network members in the first place. They are requested to demonstrate their plans to scale, therein being pressured to rush the process of building membership based on meaningful relationships. They are requested to prove their legitimacy against other pre-existing networks and justify their existence in terms of economic terms and other competitive benchmarks that have a distinctly western neoliberal feel to them such as value for money and cost-per-person-reached.

But by positioning these pressures set by the aid sector lower on their list of priorities, these genuinely inclusive networks will elevate their central and most important characteristic, which is that being community-owned they are able to put the community affected by forced displacement, including the most marginalised, right at the centre of their work and their vision. The rest of the aid sector will need to realise that the way communities affected by forced displacement conceive of change and success will often not align with their agenda setting. Any efforts to shoehorn refugee led aggregation initiatives into a western defined mould of how impact is scaled is likely to be acting contrary to the holistic, integrated and sustainable changes that refugee communities are looking for. These changes might include features such as increased agency in decision making, stronger community cohesion or transnational peace building efforts - features that don’t always come through in donor commissioned evaluation assessments.

New and diverse models of refugee-led aggregation initiatives provide a compelling lens through which to reimagine the humanitarian response to forced displacement. They serve as a clarion call for increased recognition and support for the vital work of RLOs, urging stakeholders to prioritise community-driven solutions over bureaucratic constraints. By challenging barriers created by the status-quo of aid delivered in a context of mistrust, by fostering genuine partnerships based on inclusion and shared values, these initiatives offer opportunities for progress in a localisation movement defined by tardiness and false starts on the part of the humanitarian sector. As we navigate the evolving dynamics of global displacement, the insights and innovations presented by refugee-led networks hold the promise of a more equitable, inclusive, and impactful response—one that places the agency and dignity of displaced communities at its core.

To discover more RLOs and refugee-led networks/initiatives, go to www.reframe.network.