In this together

“People with lived experience should have a say in the decisions that impact our lives,” says international lawyer and human rights advocate Rez Gardi. “We have so much more to offer than being treated as beneficiaries of aid.”

Rez, the Co-Managing Director of refugee-led organization Refugees Seeking Equal Access at the Table (R-SEAT), is helping to infuse this ethos across the humanitarian sector, including at UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency. Her organization was selected to advise UNHCR on the establishment, in 2022, of the Advisory Board to the UNHCR Task Team on Engagement with Organizations led by Forcibly Displaced and Stateless Persons. Rez now serves on the Advisory Board as one of 17 representatives of organizations led by forcibly displaced and stateless people, working to strengthen UNHCR’s collaboration with such organizations. This relatively new mechanism builds on previous efforts, establishing a systematic approach to working closely with such actors and ensuring their expertise informs more effective partnership.

Advisory Board members, for instance, help guide the UNHCR Innovation Service’s Refugee-led Innovation Fund (RLIF). From its inception, also in 2022, the RLIF was co-designed with refugees to fundamentally reshape refugee participation in designing and implementing meaningful solutions within their communities. Recognizing that refugees themselves are best suited to address challenges facing their own communities, it provides financial resources and holistic support to organizations led by forcibly displaced and stateless people to implement innovative solutions. The RLIF Steering Committee — which makes the final endorsement of awardees each year — is composed of UNHCR staff, donors, and Advisory Board members, bringing together diverse expertise to evaluate project proposals from organizations led by forcibly displaced and stateless people.

UNHCR still needs to make progress to integrate robust refugee involvement across the organization and beyond, but leaders like Rez are seeing hopeful gains that point toward a future of meaningful partnerships and participation. UNHCR’s Advisory Board model is already gaining traction among other UN agencies and humanitarian actors recognizing the value of working closely with communities with relevant lived experience and expertise. Two years into the Advisory Board tenure, and with the third selection of RLIF grantees nearing completion, it’s an opportune moment to reflect on the progress made by these initiatives so far.

Creating avenues for meaningful partnerships with refugees

Aiming to deepen its engagement with organizations led by forcibly displaced and stateless people, UNHCR worked with refugee-led networks to select and establish the first Advisory Board, pioneering a mechanism for their voices to be not only heard but also, more importantly, influential in decision making. The current cohort of 17 refugee, internally displaced, and stateless leaders, representing organizations active in every region UNHCR works in, advises the agency on relevant policies and guidelines, leads discussions at international gatherings on displacement like the Global Refugee Forum, and works on the RLIF Steering Committee.

Its members include Rez and Julius Ntobuah, the board chairman of Newcomers with Disabilities in Sweden, who shared their reflections on how they are filling a gap in the humanitarian space. Rez, who was born as a Kurdish refugee in Pakistan and resettled to New Zealand, brings to the Advisory Board her expertise in international law, including refugee law and human rights, as well as her lived experience of displacement. Julius is informed by challenges he faced as a person with a disability fleeing from Cameroon and integrating as a refugee in Sweden, along with years of advocacy experience supporting other refugees with disabilities to thrive.

Both Rez and Julius identified shortcomings in top-down refugee responses in their communities — and a need for localized, refugee-led change. Explaining what inspired her to lead, Rez says, “Within my community, we were seeing policies and programmes that were well intentioned but not reaching the people that they intended to reach. … Time and time again, we were seeing a clear gap between what refugee communities need and then what people with decision making power were doing.” Even when refugees were consulted, she noticed there was a tendency towards tokenistic approaches focused on storytelling rather than soliciting genuine policy guidance.

The Advisory Board, in contrast, represents progress towards meaningful, institutionalized engagement, taking into account not only lived experience but also the expertise of refugee leaders. Members, experts in everything from early childhood development to the protection needs of LGBTIQ+ persons, bring an invaluable perspective to the development of UNHCR’s policies and responses. From their contributions to UNHCR’s Policy on Child Protection to the creation of a global network for refugees with disabilities, the Advisory Board has already seen several large achievements in its early development

Recognizing the Advisory Board’s valuable contribution and investment of expertise and time, UNHCR decided to extend its initial two-year tenure and compensate members, which Julius considers a big achievement for refugee engagement. Magnolia Turbidy, UNHCR’s Associate Protection Officer working as a focal point for meaningful refugee engagement, says of the Advisory Board, “With it being so successful and picking up traction, and other organizations — including other UN [ones] — wanting to also develop similar advisory boards,” there was no question that it should continue guiding UNHCR’s approach to leading with refugees.

Steering the RLIF in the right direction

One of the clearest ways the Advisory Board is making a difference in UNHCR is through its involvement in the Refugee-led Innovation Fund — first in helping to develop the Fund and now as part of its Steering Committee. Rez notes that, from a very early stage in the development of the RLIF, “We were involved in relaying our thoughts and our vision — and we’re very pleased to see that some of that has been incorporated into the [Fund’s] approach.” On an ongoing basis, members of the Advisory Board act as its representatives on the Fund’s Steering Committee, which selects the final grantees from among all shortlisted candidates.

For the past two years, two of those Advisory Board members have been Rez and Julius. Their involvement in the review of innovative solutions proposed by organizations led by forcibly displaced and stateless people enables UNHCR to learn from their leaders’ experiential, context-specific knowledge. Julius, for instance, provides insights into the value and inventiveness of project ideas tailored to the cultural and sociopolitical contexts in West and Central Africa and in Europe. Rez, with the experience of running three refugee-led organizations across different contexts and thematic areas, is able to provide a strong sense of which proposals can “really shift from an idea that’s good on paper to something that’s feasible, tangible, and able to have an impact on the ground.”

On the Steering Committee, donors have the opportunity to learn from refugees’ perspectives and priorities, and refugee leaders, for their part, become well versed in what donors are looking for in a project. “Getting to know how different decisions are taken to fund organizations, I think, is beneficial to me and to my organization,” Julius explains. Rez has similarly valued these insights, reflecting that “[it] helps me understand what refugee-led organizations could be doing to better position themselves for funding opportunities.”

The Advisory Board — as Nadja Guggi, UNHCR Localization Specialist, says — aims to create a “two-way learning exchange, instead of just international actors always training the local actors.” The RLIF Steering Committee is one venue where this exchange is playing out.

Strengthening the role of the Advisory Board in the RLIF

Building on progress the Advisory Board members have seen thus far, Rez and Julius are hopeful that the participation of organizations led by forcibly displaced and stateless people will continue to expand within UNHCR, including through the RLIF. Based on feedback from past years, and the Advisory Board’s growing role within UNHCR, Advisory Board members will now be involved from the early stages of the next Fund selection process, before organizations have been shortlisted. “I personally would like to come in at an earlier stage,” says Rez, “because I think that it is evident from the discussions that everyone is bringing in quite a unique lens, and it’s very different what we’re taking into account, as a refugee-led organization.”

The Advisory Board members also have ideas for enhancing the RLIF’s approach to seeking and selecting applicants. Julius suggests disseminating more information about what innovation means to UNHCR and for the purposes of the Fund, in order to better support refugee-led organizations hoping to apply. There is much to be gleaned from his and all of the members’ insights, to understand what’s working, what isn’t, and how the RLIF process can be further refined moving forward. To this end, the Innovation Service conducted a lessons learned workshop with Advisory Board members following the 2024 selection process and is working to incorporate their suggestions.

Both Julius and Rez remain committed to the overall aims and ethos of the Fund. As Julius says, “It’s true that there’s 120 million people displaced, but among these people, there’s also hidden talent that cannot be found somewhere else.” One way to promote that talent, he says, is the RLIF. “Is it perfect? No. But we can always make it better.”

A commitment to refugee engagement

Both Rez and Julius emphasize the significant inroads UNHCR and refugee-led organizations have made together in institutionalizing meaningful refugee participation across decision-making spheres. This commitment to engagement with forcibly displaced and stateless people must be maintained and expanded — at UNHCR and across the humanitarian sector — to ensure policies and responses are effective and in line with the lived realities of people forced to flee.

“While it’s slow, we’ve made meaningful progress,” says Rez. She adds, also, the importance of building on these gains through sustained collaboration between refugee-led organizations and humanitarian actors like UNHCR, who she has observed “really believe that refugees should have a seat at the table and are actively trying to find ways to work better together.” She says, “It’s been a coordinated effort from all fronts, and that’s what we need. … We’ve got to be in this together, now more than ever.”