Financing for forced displacement response is not fit for purpose. The needs of refugees and their host communities far outstrip resources while displacement only grows. The international community continues to facilitate an aid model that was built by a small group of people as a band-aid to address short-term problems. Despite numerous calls for a transformation of the humanitarian and development system, this aid model has not yet shifted to meet today’s reality of protracted, large-scale displacement crises. We cannot keep relying on and supporting this unfit system that encourages traditional actors to do more of the same, especially when funding is scarce. The countries and communities that receive slowly diminishing resources from donors each year – instead of there being a collective radical rethink of the aid complex – are only being hurt by this approach.

A transformation of the humanitarian system will require dismantling many of the current, entrenched, top-down ways of working. Although short-term humanitarian assistance can still be useful in acute crises, the overall system must shift to financing and implementing approaches that can drive sustainable change. Humanitarian actors – implementers, multilateral institutions and donors – must think outside the box, beyond traditional aid, and consider what is needed from non-traditional global and local actors who can identify opportunities for and make real investments in markets and communities. From the global to local level, we need new, innovative ways to finance responses to displacement.

Identifying the challenges that impede effective financing for forced displacement response, and finding creative and community-led solutions to these challenges, is the reason the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation’s Refugees initiative supported this issue of Forced Migration Review. We hope it inspires our fellow philanthropic donors to lean into their flexibility and catalytic potential to mitigate the perceived risks of investing directly in refugee-led organisations and in the emerging markets where refugees live. We hope implementers feel encouraged to push donors to give them the space to design and work in more long-term, refugee-led, market-driven and climate-responsive ways. We hope bilateral governments and multilateral institutions act on their commitments to prioritise delivering funding more directly to the populations and markets they seek to serve, break down their own silos, and give partners room to think creatively. And we hope the private sector follows our lead, embraces risk and makes big investments (we promise there will be big returns) in what we can demonstrate works.

Communities of forcibly displaced people deserve so much more. If we can each find in these articles some concrete steps towards a more fit model for responding to displacement we might be able to start to transform the system and create sustainable change.

 

Lauren Post Thomas and Barri Shorey
Conrad N. Hilton Foundation

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