Despite being highly motivated to practise medicine, refugee doctors[1] in the United States (US) and elsewhere often find themselves working in low-skilled jobs while waiting to get into residency programmes.[2] They may face difficulties in communication, providing documentation and verifying…
The Government of Uganda has made self-reliance central to the country’s approach towards hosting refugees. Currently, Uganda hosts more than one million refugees of diverse nationalities, including from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Somalia, South Sudan and Rwanda, who…
Of the approximately 164,500 officially registered refugees residing in Rwanda today, 45% are from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The Rwandan government has adopted a relatively progressive policy approach to support the integration of refugees, and refugees have the…
On behalf of the Norwegian Refugee Council, it is a pleasure for me to welcome you all to this conference. NRC’s interest in the conference is twofold: Firstly, as an NGO active in promoting the rights of the internally displaced,…
In Norwegian we have an expression: ‘to fall between two chairs’. I think the English equivalent is to ‘fall between the cracks’. In many ways, this describes the situation of IDPs. On the one hand, they have often been…
I would like to thank the Norwegian Refugee Council, NTNU and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) for inviting us all to this seminar on the response strategies of people who are displaced by conflict within the borders of their…
I would like to start with an overview of the Response Strategies Project. We started with two principal objectives, the first of which was to understand how individuals in communities respond to displacement. We felt that, while there was a…
I speak as an IDP woman whose husband was missing after the war in Georgia, displaced with two small children, no shelter and no job. I speak also as a leader of an NGO which I set up with several…
In the 1980s the department of Cordoba started to be affected by the presence of paramilitary groups and by their actions against the civil population, especially against peasant, community and union leaders. At the end of the 1990s, I was…
Governments and the UN believe that the response to internal displacement has often been ineffective. In order to strengthen the international community’s response in situations of internal displacement, a new Unit has been established under the UN Inter-Agency Standing Committee.…