By the end of 2020, some 82.4 million people were displaced from their homes. This is the highest number ever recorded – an increase of 2.9 million on the previous year. The Covid-19 pandemic has become a risk multiplier for vulnerable groups interacting with other drivers of forced displacement like conflict, persecution, and climate change.
The response to these growing and intersecting challenges requires close coordination to ensure complementarity in approaches, a focus on sustainable solutions for displaced populations and the ability to take principled humanitarian action.
As the global fragile and forced displacement crisis continues to deepen, the role of institutions like the World Bank Group (WBG)—which is uniquely positioned to inform national policies and implement programs that reach affected populations—is more critical than ever. The Forced Displacement Working Group (FDWG) of InterAction led the development of a suit of five thematic papers to provide the WBG and other investors an overview of several issues affecting the forcibly displaced and key components to strengthening their engagement in fragile and forced displacement settings.
Overall, the papers focus on how the WBG’s policy and programmatic interventions can be best focused to result in tangible change in the lives of affected communities and to ensure that no one is left behind. NRC drafted two of those papers on the topics of Legal Identity, and Housing, Land, and Property (HLP) Rights. The topics of the other papers include livelihoods, gender and inclusivity, and early childhood development.
The HLP thematic paper ‘Access to Housing, Land and Property in Forced Displacement Context’ focuses on the promotion of access to housing, land, and property to realise sustainable solutions for refugees and internally displaced persons.
The paper underlines the role the WBG and other investors can play in strengthening host government response host governments to displaced person’s HLP access challenges and recommends implementing concrete mechanisms to enable displaced persons’ access to HLP, undertaking policy dialogue with governments, and addressing HLP rights violations as part of development efforts.
The Legal Identity thematic paper focuses on the role that the WBG can play to prioritize access to legal identity as a desired goal in countries hosting significant numbers of displaced people to support solutions and inclusive development outcomes. The paper underlines the need for reliable statistics and data about the extent of the problem in forced displacement contexts and calls for comprehensive analysis frameworks that take into consideration specific vulnerabilities faced by refugees and internally displaced people.
The WBG is possibly the biggest development actor in the field of legal identity and a champion of the Principles on Identification for Sustainable Development. It is well positioned to lead on evidence generation and analysis as well as promoting stakeholder engagement and knowledge sharing for inclusive ID and civil registration systems.
Download – Suit of five Thematic Papers on Fragile and Forced Displacement Contexts:
