Speaking For Ourselves: Hearing Refugee Voices, A Journey Towards Empowerment

UNHCR is committed to addressing discrimination and inequality to ensure equal enjoyment of rights by all persons of concern, asylum-seekers, refugees, returnees, internally displaced persons (IDPs) and stateless persons. Through the systematic application of an Age, Gender and Diversity (AGD) approach in its operations worldwide, UNHCR seeks to ensure that all women, men, boys and girls of concern enjoy their rights on an equal footing and are able to participate fully in the decisions that affect their lives and the lives of their family members and communities. The AGD approach is participatory, rights and community-based, and builds on the broad range of capacities and resources existing within the community of persons of concern in the design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of policies, programmes and activities.

Though the UNHCR Executive Committee (ExCom) has called on UNHCR and states to promote and implement the AGD approach, this is all too often seen as ”something for UNHCR to do in its operations” rather than an approach we should all use as our way of working when engaging with and for asylum-seekers, refugees, returnees, IDPs and stateless persons.

In this context, UNHCR thought it relevant and useful to identify good practices in applying the AGD approach that could serve as potential models for how states too could promote and implement this approach. The UNHCR Bureau for Europe and the Regional Representation in Northern Europe therefore launched an engagement process in Finland in 2013-2014 to promote the AGD approach and the identification of good practices that could help the further implementation of this approach in European countries with sophisticated asylum, resettlement and integration systems.

The process in Finland has therefore sought to question the concepts underpinning the UNHCR AGD approach with regard to their applicability by states, NGOs and civil society in industrialized countries. Of particular interest were the concepts of meaningful participation and empowerment. The research therefore encompassed all forms of participation, from one-off consultation and active engagement, to participation and collaboration through co-design and co-delivery, and looked at whether these various approaches aimed at the empowerment of the persons of concern involved and their communities.