Uganda’s long and brutal civil war resulted in the internal displacement of nearly 1.6 million civilians, of whom an estimated 300,000 to 600,000 fled not to one of the country’s many IDP camps but to urban destinations. In July and…
Yemen shares characteristics with many other countries hosting urban refugees: lack of durable solutions; challenges of quantifying populations; a host government evading Convention responsibilities; hostility from a once-welcoming host community; political interference in choice of implementing partners; and, most fundamentally,…
Since the late 1990s, Colombia’s major cities have been places where people become displaced between communes and quarters of the cities. The city continues to receive people displaced from the countryside but cannot be considered a safe refuge for them.…
Those are the words of a UNHCR staff member in the Syrian capital of Damascus, referring to the challenge of responding to the massive Iraqi refugee exodus that has taken place since 2006. UNHCR is familiar with the demands of…
Over 40,000 refugees and asylum seekers in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan (Jordan) are registered with UNHCR and live primarily in urban settings. As Jordan has functioning national institutions, UNHCR has concentrated on reinforcing the capacity of Jordanian institutions (such…
When the first group of Palestinian refugees arrived in April 2008 in La Calera, a city of 60,000 inhabitants in central Chile, it was a great event. The central square was filled with people as the people of Calera gave…
In the relentless heat of the Pakistan summer, with temperatures well in excess of 40 degrees centigrade, the heat inside the tents used by hundreds of thousands of those displaced during 2009’s conflict in North West Frontier Province (NWFP) and…
High mobility of refugees out of camps – to look for economic opportunities in urban areas – has often been seen by organisations as a challenge to maintaining accurate data about populations and the delivery of services. However, mobility has…
Worldwide, maternal mortality rates have hardly changed since 1990[1] and they are particularly high in countries recently affected by large-scale conflict. Access to reproductive health (RH) services, including family planning and emergency obstetric care (EmOC), is critical to reducing maternal…
In the space of a few weeks of May 2008, a vast number of primarily African non-nationals were violently displaced from their communities of ‘urban integration’ in South African townships. Large numbers of asylum seekers and refugees became IDPs –…