The world must start to think about the way refugees are talked about and helped.

Mustafa Alio, The Independent

The number of refugees worldwide has reached 70 million. Confronted with a number like that, this week’s Global Refugee Forum in Geneva is facing up to a massive crisis – but it must also start to think about the way refugees are talked about and helped.

At gatherings like this, refugees are generally discussed as recipients of humanitarian aid, not agents in control of their own lives. The huge scope for real progress in this forum and what it represents, has to include the very people it is intended to help.

Refugees the world over are becoming self-reliant and included in communities, taking educational and economic opportunities, and setting up successful refugee-led organisations. We need look no further than initiatives put forward by refugees themselves: the Rainmaker Enterprise in South Sudan, the White Helmets in Syria, Empower in New Zealand, the Young Republic in Sweden, Jumpstart Refugee Talent in Canada, and many others.

Yet we refugees are often shut out of discussions about how to help us. In some ways, our “issues” are more important than we are, and benevolent voices of empathy and support drown out our own. The question is whether governments, NGOs and other non-profits will simply continue trying to assist refugees, or whether they will be bold enough to empower them further.

Refugees are not just beneficiaries, victims, and charity cases. We are also able to shape our own lives, and we are the obvious partners in programmes to support us.

Refugees can teach a thing or two about survival, resource-building, settlement and resettlement, peace-building, transitional justice, and re-construction. We are the obvious partners in the process of their own support – and evidence is mounting that refugees are also good for the economy.

The Paris School of Economics, CNRS, did a study of asylum seekers and migrants in 15 European countries and regions and found that within two years of an influx of migrants, unemployment rates drop and economic health improves.

You can also look at figures from Germany, where more than 50% of refugees work in skilled jobs, or the US Department of Health and Human Services, which found that refugees gave back $63bn more than what they took in services in the last 10 years.

As a refugee myself, this was the major shift I tried to make when I co-founded Jumpstart Refugee Talent, a refugee-led non-profit that works with new arrivals in Canada, helping them into education and matching their transferable skills with employment opportunities.

The demand is certainly there. Cities such as Toronto have thousands of technology-sector jobs to fill, and the existing supply cannot fill them. That need aligns closely with acute migration crises like that of 2015-2016. Along with skills shortages, many countries are also dealing with rapidly ageing populations and their ensuing impact on services and economic growth. The future cannot be faced without newcomers.

A refugee-led organisation has a deeper understanding of their clientele. Though they’re often are told they’re “too small” or just “implementing partners”, these organisations frequently prove otherwise.

And through organisations and initiatives like the Network for Refugee Voices and the Asia Pacific Network Of Refugees, refugees are catalysing the change needed to address the global crisis. The UN General Assembly affirmed through the Global Compact on Refugees that refugees are key stakeholders in this process, whether through recruitment of local personnel by humanitarian and development agencies or in having refugees as board members.

One especially important example of how to empower refugees is the Economic Mobility Pathways Project (EMPP), a model that allows refugees to immigrate in a kind of economic stream to well-matched work connections. The EMPP also ensures that refugees’ immigration pathways are well-supported, with legal assistance to deal with issues like lost documentation. We at Jumpstart were the first Canadian partner to work on the EMPP – with Washington-based NGO Talent Beyond Boundaries – before the Canadian government adopted the EMPP idea in 2018. The Economic Mobility Pathway model is being negotiated now in UK, Germany, Sweden and other European nations. Clearly, helping refugees to help, rather than take from, their host countries’ economies is becoming a world concern.

Events like the Global Refugee Forum can put the refugee crisis back on the world stage. They can help enable what UN secretary general António Gutteres called “real progress on access to education, livelihoods, and energy,” smart laws and policies, innovative public-private partnerships and more – all of which could transform the lives of refugees and the communities who welcome them.

But the work of refugee-led organisations should not be overlooked, denied or denigrated. It is my belief that truly transformational impact will come from not from the architects of global and national policy, but from organisations led by refugees themselves. Nihil de nobis, sine nobis: “Nothing about us should be without us.”