Forced Displacement

Forced displacement is a developmental challenge, not only a humanitarian concern. The number of people forcibly displaced from their homes, regions, and countries increased sharply around 2010.  . Since then, this number has only grown, by the end of 2022, there were 108.4 million forcibly displaced people across the world. Also:

35.3 million were refugees and 62.5 million were internally displaced -- While the international spotlight is on refugees who cross international borders, more than twice as many forcibly displaced people remain displaced within their own country. In 2022, the number of new internal displacements caused by conflict and violence was three times higher than the annual average of the past 10 years –due mostly to rapidly escalating conflict in countries like Ukraine and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

67% of refugees had been displaced for five or more years as of end-2022 --When displacement has no clear end in sight, other needs surface beyond humanitarian needs: jobs, education for displaced children, and the legal frameworks and policies that can make all of this possible. These needs are shared by all long-term forcibly displaced people.

3 out of 4 refugees are hosted in developing countries – These countries are already struggling to reach their own development goals, and accommodating the sudden arrival of vulnerable newcomers presents a challenge for host governments and puts pressure on their ability to deliver basic services and infrastructure. Given these added pressures, host communities need support, too.

Forcibly displaced people are particularly vulnerable to food insecurity: millions of them come from countries affected by food crises and in 2021 more than 80 percent were living in territories affected by food crises. On top of this, climate change is increasingly intersecting with forced displacement, and has the potential to amplify the movements of people within countries and across borders.

Many host countries in the developing world are taking the lead to better manage these crises by including refugees in their country’s development plans and in their health and education systems, for example. The global community is also working to improve the transition between humanitarian and development assistance, aligning these efforts under the  Global Compact on Refugees led by UNHCR.  

Last Updated: Jul 05, 2023

Recognizing that most situations of forced displacement have become protracted, the World Bank Group emphasizes in its Strategy for Fragility, Conflict, and Violence the importance of taking, from the outset, a medium-term development perspective with a view to addressing the socioeconomic needs and aspirations of those forcibly displaced and their host communities.

The 2023 World Development Report (WDR): Migrants, Refugees and Societies provides more explicit guidance on policy actions that:

1. encourage refugees’ internal mobility to enable them to move to places with better job opportunities and services;
2. promote refugees’ self-reliance by providing predictable and secure terms of stay, right to work, and incentives for the private sector to create jobs;
3. deliver services to refugees through national systems; and
4. strengthen institutional and financial arrangements.

The WDR calls for progress in countries of origin to address root causes of forced displacement, as well as to support voluntary repatriation and reintegration. And recognizing that few countries provide external financing and resettlement opportunities, the WDR also calls for determined international efforts to strengthen responsibility-sharing.

The 2021 paper A Development Approach to Conflict-Induced Internal Displacement explores how the WBG can ensure that IDPs benefit more from existing development financing through policy dialogue, sector work, and safeguards. Specifically, it does not call for dedicated financing for IDPs and their hosts, and instead it recommends applying an “IDP lens” across the entire WBG portfolio to ensure that these communities do not face discrimination and exclusion in their access to development benefits.

Through its development approach to forced displacement, the Bank:

• complements the emergency relief activities of humanitarian organizations
• focuses on addressing longer-term, social and economic challenges --especially jobs and education-- and on closing gender gaps by empowering women and girls
• benefits both the forcibly displaced and their hosts.

In partnership with UNHCR and other organizations, the Bank works through:

• better data and analytics to inform results-driven strategies
• innovative financing to address the variety of forced displacement situations
• effective operations on the ground

Financing

For low-income host countries, the International Development Association (IDA) provides financing through the Window for Host communities and Refugees (WHR) for operations that specifically target these groups. In the IDA18 and IDA19 replenishments, the WBG programmed resources of more than $3.1 billion to this end. Under IDA20 (covering July 2022-June 2025), $2.4 billion has been allocated to promote medium to long-term development opportunities for refugees and their hosts, with emphasis on government policy commitment, resilient and inclusive recovery, social cohesion, and gender equality.

Middle-income countries hosting large numbers of refugees may access funds though the Global Concessional Financing Facility (GCFF), an international partnership launched with the UN and the Islamic Development Bank and managed by the WB that provides concessional financing for development projects that benefit refugees and host communities. So far, the GCFF has provided more than $775 million in grants to unlock $6.2 billion in concessional finance for Jordan, Lebanon, Colombia, Ecuador, Costa Rica, and Moldova.

The International Finance Corporation (IFC) is leading efforts to engage the private sector in supporting refugees and hosts. IFC works with the World Bank, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and other partners to identify private sector solutions and opportunities for refugees and their host communities. It has four aims: creating jobs by boosting access to finance and entrepreneurship, improving the delivery of basic services like education and energy, encouraging business-friendly policies in refugee-hosting areas, and sharing lessons learned while deepening partnerships.

Data and Analytics

Research at the World Bank Group aims to build the evidence base on addressing the social and economic aspects of forced displacement. Better data and analytics help to inform policies and refine the targeting of development programs that can improve the lives of affected people.

The World Bank-UNHCR Joint Data Center on Forced Displacement seeks to ensure effective, reliable, publicly available data to inform decision-making for both the development and humanitarian communities; and to improve the collection, analysis and public dissemination of household level socioeconomic data on those who are forcibly displaced.

The Building the Evidence on Forced Displacement program finances large multi-country and multi-partner research projects that address questions of global interest related to forced displacement in five strategic thematic areas: jobs, health, education, social protection and gender. The initiative also synthesizes lessons emerging from the entire research program and complements them with additional studies. It has also produced the FCV Data Platform, a collection of more than 1,200 datasets intended to support analytical work on issues related to forced displacement and other aspects of fragility and conflict.

Other World Bank Group analytical work includes:

• A Development Approach to Conflict-Induced Internal Displacement
• Forcibly Displaced: Toward a Development Approach Supporting Refugees, the Internally Displaced, and Their Hosts
• The Mobility of Displaced Syrians: An Economic and Social Analysis
• Migration from Venezuela to Colombia: Short- and Medium-Term Impact and Response Strategy (Español/Spanish)
• Kakuma as a Marketplace

The World Bank is also part of the Private Sector for Refugees (PS4R) initiative, which seeks to promote employment, entrepreneurship, investment, and services for refugees and host communities by identifying, analyzing, sharing knowledge and expertise, and raising awareness about the many ways companies can engage with refugees around the world.

Last Updated: May 30, 2023

Before 2016, most of the WBG's work on forced displacement was limited to analytical and advisory work financed through trust funds. It was after the launch of the GCFF in 2016 and financing through IDA's Regional Sub-window for Refugees and Host Communities became available in 2018, that the number of projects focused on forced displacement began to grow rapidly. This increase in operations has been accompanied by an expanded data and analytics program.

The World Bank developed in 2020, through a consultative process, a Refugee Policy Review Framework (RPRF) to provide a methodology for systematically reviewing the refugee policy and institutional environments in countries eligible for funding from IDA's Window for Host Communities and Refugees. There have been significant refugee policy developments in all of these countries and, while many of these had been initiated years earlier, others are correlated with the eligibility process for additional funding from the Bank.

The report “Estimating Poverty among Refugee Populations: A Cross Survey Imputation Exercise for Chad”, produced by the Building the Evidence on Forced Displacement Program, developed new approaches for measuring poverty of refugees in a context where comparable welfare data for refugees and nationals did not exist. The research has the potential to be scaled up and used to inform programs for other refugee populations.

The IFC’s Digital Data Corridors initiative allows financial institutions to work electronically across borders and receive international credit histories, identity verification, and bank transaction data in real time. With this information, Ukrainian refugees who ran successful small businesses in their country and were told their credit history was insufficient to obtain financing in their host countries, can now get easier access to credit cards, loans, and other services.

In Bangladesh, the Additional Financing for the Health Sector Support Project has supported immunizations for over 87,000 displaced Rohingya children, has provided access to women-friendly services on sexual and reproductive health and rights and on gender-based violence for over 408,000 displaced Rohingya women and girls, and has increased from 4 to 98 the number of  facilities providing an appropriate mix of family planning methods. 

In Ethiopia, the Economic Opportunities Project provided financing for the passage of a new refugees Proclamation in 2019, which allowed refugees to obtain work permits and drivers’ licenses, and to access primary education.

The Refugees and Host Communities Project in Chad has provided cash transfers reaching over 25,000 beneficiary households, including 21,000 refugees. The project is also supporting the capacity building of the National Commission for Refugees (CNARR) to execute its tasks in the refugee camps, benefitting over 200,000 refugees.

The 2017 Development Response to Displacement Impacts Project (DRDIP) is a US$428 million regional operation in the Horn of Africa covering Djibouti, Kenya, Uganda, and Ethiopia, which seeks to mitigate the social, economic and environmental impacts of protracted refugee presence. It invests in improving access to education, health, clean water, market facilities and roads, as well as expanding economic opportunities and enhancing environmental management for communities hosting refugees. As of February 2022, over 2,000 community infrastructure subprojects had been completed, providing improved access to social and economic services and infrastructure for over 5.4 million people and 4 million days of paid labor for construction work. The project provided 140,000 people with improved access to energy, 300,000 beneficiaries have reported increased income, and sustainable land management practices have been adopted on 40,000 hectares of land.

The $750m Second Colombia Fiscal Sustainability, Competitiveness, and Migration Development Policy Financing (DPF), with $31.5m grant financing from the Global Concessional Financing Facility (GCFF), supported the government to implement policies to regularize and integrate Venezuelan migrants into Colombia. A World Bank report informed the government’s policy actions to improve the migrants’ access to basic services and jobs. Some 281,557 migrants (nearly 50 percent were women) obtained Special Permanent Stay Permits (Permiso Especial de Permanencia, or PEP). The permits helped regularize the migrants’ legal status, ensuring that they had access to education, healthcare, clean water and sanitation, housing and childcare services. They also enabled 76,744 job-seeking migrants to get  services from the National Employment Agency.

Last Updated: May 30, 2023

The WBG maintains partnerships with humanitarian, development and private sector actors in the area of forced displacement to maximize impact on the ground.

The WBG’s cooperation with UNHCR has become a solid strategic and operational partnership characterized by each organization’s comparative advantages. They complement each other in implementing projects, coordinating policy dialogue with governments, and producing joint assessments, data analysis, and evidence-building research. In December 2022, IFC established a Joint Initiative with UNHCR to boost private sector engagement for refugees and their host communities.

At the country level, the WBG coordinates with development and humanitarian partners, including extensive cooperation with UN agencies such as IOM, UNRWA, UNICEF, FAO, WFP, and UN Women.

The World Bank is also part of the Partnership for Improving Prospects for Host Communities and Forcibly Displaced Persons (PROSPECTS) initiated by the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The partnership leverages the comparative advantages of five humanitarian and development agencies (IFC, ILO, UNHCR, UNICEF and the World Bank) to help transform the response to forced displacement crises through global, regional, and country-level programs. The World Bank’s efforts under the PROSPECTS program include over 40 country-level, regional and global activities addressing the challenges of refugee education, protection, employment and livelihoods. 

Last Updated: May 30, 2023