Whose Vision is it Anyway?

 

Vision for Change - Whose Vision Is It Anyway? 

There are many problems in the world we would want to see change and the world’s challenges are all interconnected in one way or another. Since 2008 we have been learning and understanding the multitude of challenges faced by people who have been forcibly displaced, and we decided long ago that the vision for change we want to see as an organisation is the change that refugee communities want to see. People affected by forced displacement around the world face very different challenges according to their separate contexts as well as due to their various individual circumstances but there are also commonalities in the challenges and restrictions faced by refugee communities as well as commonalities in the way that refugees are able to imagine a better today and a better tomorrow. 

One commonality is the way that having been a victim of forced displacement, with the upheavals and tragedies that accompany such events, refugees find themselves with reduced rights and reduced freedoms and reduced agency over their lives. These reductions in freedoms and rights can be structurally embedded in national or international law, can be the consequences of social dynamics such as xenophobia, and can be connected to resources and exasperated wealth inequalities around the world. There is really no refugee context around the world where either some or all of these dynamics are not present. From the perspective of justice we do not feel that it is right that someone should have to experience such changes to their lives when they have committed no crimes, especially after experiencing the upheaval of forced displacement.  From a position of compassion and solidarity, we are driven to ensure we do better as a global community in including the most vulnerable. From the perspective of utilitarian ethics we do not believe that the current nature of the refugee response gives maximum benefit to us all as global citizens, not least because refugees are denied the opportunity of contributing in the way that they would like to global peace and prosperity. 

Over the last 15 years we have been a team informed by the visions for change that people who have experienced forced displacement would like to see. Central to visions for change are the ideas that communities of people affected by forced displacement should see a rebalancing of their rights and freedoms and access to the resources that would enable them to take back control of their lives and make decisions about their own futures. 

Needs and opportunities as defined by refugees start from the most basic needs of the most marginalised in their communities including those in need of emergency help in a time of crisis, the need to be safe, to have shelter, a healthy diet, good health and basic education. Refugees define a better future in terms of access to jobs and livelihoods, good learning opportunities, peaceful coexistence in sustainable communities. Definitions extend to the opportunities for future prosperity that refugees see with refugee and hosting communities developing together with integrated progress towards shared dividends, with community members of all backgrounds able to enjoy fulfilled lives. At Cohere we have heard and experienced these expressions of a better future time and time again and indeed we have seen many examples of when these visions for a better future have become a reality. In our sector this success is captured in the sanitised word - IMPACT. 

But what we have also learnt is that it is the communities affected by forced displacement, and only these communities, who can define what success means for their communities. When someone from outside the community frames success on behalf of a refugee community and controls the outcomes and experiences for refugees then there is a key element that directly contradicts the vision for change that refugees want to see - decisions forced or imposed upon communities, even with the best intentions, impedes that same community of their right and their wish to be able to make the decisions themselves that affect their lives. 

A refugee response that is led by people affected by forced displacement (and this includes the immediately hosting community) is the only appropriate means of achieving impact and achieving the individual visions for change for refugees. Also, insofar as the response is refugee-led this shift in power is part of the end itself because in the process of leading the changes in their communities refugees are better able to access the rights and freedom of agency that forced displacement has curtailed. But, it is only an end in itself if upholding the agency of refugee leaders simultaneously serves to shift power to the most marginalised in a refugee community who don’t have a platform to air their voices or stand in a position of leadership. 

We need to recognise that the rights and freedoms of every individual have to be considered in relation to rights and liberties of everyone else around them, and in every community, rights and liberties will clash. Someone’s right to not be offended, for example, will clash with their neighbour’s right to freedom of expression.  It is theoretically possible that a refugee leader’s right to lead and make decisions on behalf of their community will clash with the right of the individuals in their communities to make the decisions over their own lives or their right to be included in refugee-led programmes. In other words it could be possible for an organisation like Cohere to support an objective that seems like an end goal - shifting power to refugee leadership- while at the same time further limiting the rights and freedoms of individual refugees in controlling their own lives. In such a situation we are making a choice to support one person’s vision for change over another’s. 

Why is it Cohere’s responsibility to consider this? Some, including some refugee leaders, would argue that this whole question is not Cohere’s concern because there are enough refugee leaders who have proven that they prioritise the needs and visions of the most marginalised in their communities in the most inclusive way, and indeed there are structures of refugee leadership up to the global level designed to best channel support to inclusive leaders. These entities should be the ones to choose whose rights and visions should be considered as part of the refugee response. We do and will align our work with these initiatives -  but as long as Cohere exists and we have an element of influence to exert, every decision we make must be a decision that takes into account all the people that decision will impact, even if, or especially if, that means deferring day to day decision making to refugee-led decision making structures. 

The good news is that of course many refugee leaders are listening to and making decisions with all their community members and prioritising the needs of the most vulnerable, creating a buy-in for aligned visions within the community and in partnership with hosting communities. To know how to best exert our influence towards bringing about this alignment really depends on Cohere listening to and being led by a broad and diverse array of voices, so that we can be informed by the visions of the most marginalised in any community, whether they have a pre-existing platform for leadership or not. It also means that Cohere cannot shy away from having influence as an ally, we just need to be clearer as to whom we are allies to. Lastly, we need to think about who Cohere is when we say that Cohere is exerting influence and to create clarity on the outwardly rippling rings that make up the concept of Cohere as a “team”.  Exploring these questions will be central to this theory of change process. 

Conclusion 

Individuals, communities and leaders in contexts affected by forced displacement able to communicate and work towards aligned and integrated visions for change. This is what we want to see. This is happening and it would be good to see it happen more. How can community visions for change be more aligned and more inclusive to all voices? How can barriers to this be reduced? How can the communities access the power they need to have this agency so that their futures are not being imposed on them by someone from the outside, who may not have their best interests at heart, or may even have cynical or self-interested motives behind the decisions they impose on refugee populations? We will try to address these questions collectively before contemplating what Cohere’s role could be.

The Concept of Giving and Donations in World of Forced Displacement

 As Cohere embarks on a journey of internal reform and shifting power we are also asking ourselves questions about the appropriate roles and responsibilities of donors and funding intermediaries in the refugee response. In this blog I call for approaches that uphold engagement, understanding and solidarity as equally important and the concept of giving. 

There are clear causal links between global wealth inequality and forced displacement. Past colonialism was explicitly wealth extracting and the scars of colonialism are etched into today’s conflicts around borders and resources. Today, to add to on-going neocolonial extractive global systems, the wealthiest countries are the biggest consumers and consequently the most responsible for the climate crisis that will forcibly displace hundreds of millions of people in coming decades. 

The majority of people who are forcibly displaced need urgent humanitarian assistance. Their needs must be met by people who are less vulnerable and more prosperous than them. Refugees aren’t wholly dependent on the globally prosperous, and not all need assistance for long, as there are unrecognised resources within refugee communities and the communities immediately hosting them who are often not beneficiaries of global wealth injustices. However, the unavoidable fact is that when people are forcibly displaced they usually depend to a certain degree on other people choosing to help them.

Today, virtually all giving to refugee communities is based on choice. The choice of donors to give to a particular cause, the choice of governments to spend taxpayer money on addressing the challenges of forced displacements. Despite the fact that those who have benefitted from global wealth injustices have a moral obligation to share their wealth with those affected by global inequalities, there is no compunction to share their wealth. There are currently no legal systems that I know of in which refugee populations could sue the globally wealthy for the world’s injustices and demand reparations to compensate for their experience. (Perhaps it could be something someone might try one day in the wake of on-going attempts to demand reparations for slavery and war crimes.)

For now, refugee communities need people to choose to give, and this creates a power dynamic where the giver has power over the receiver - has power to determine elements of someone’s life over which they have no control. This power exists whether the giver is a professional donor agency, a government donor transferring taxpayer funding, or an individual donor giving their own money. The power also exists if the “giver” is an international NGO that has received the funding from another donor and is passing on that funding, of course while taking a significant cut to fund their existence. It makes sense for refugee communities to be connected  most directly with the original givers, such as when refugee-led organisations receive funding directly from donors, rather than as downstream recipients of a long chain of intermediary humanitarian agencies. Currently, less than 1% of funding allocated to refugee responses is controlled by refugee led organsations, and one of the reasons for this is the incredible wastage of resources that fund humanitarian agencies who may eventually go on to channel (some) funds to refugee leaders. 

When donors are connected more directly to refugee leaders, humanitarian funds are used more efficiently. Cohere is trying to make this happen through the platform we co-launched, Reframe.network, which already enables donors to give in such a way that 100% of their donation will be received by refugee leaders. These donors may choose to give out of a sense of altruism or generosity, and hopefully others give out of sense of solidarity, that as human race we have to all move forward together. Some may give out of a sense of collective responsibility for the situation we find our world in today, and still others may interpret their level of privilege as unfair and a consequence of an unjust history, with a view to playing their role in rebalancing privilege and justice.

We would hope that individual donors would not give as a way of grandstanding, or as a tokenistic gesture to mask a perpetuating a power imbalance. They would not give with one hand, with the explicit intention of extracting with the other in the way explicitly espoused by  government aid strategies.

When individuals make a choice to give, especially when their motives are genuine, they are expressing an important freedom and part of that freedom involves the right to choose who to give to and how to give it. At the same time we should remember that refugee led organisations (RLOs) are also in the position of choosing how to spend these resources on behalf of the communities they serve, knowing, as we do, that they don’t use the funds directly for their own personal benefit. They need to make decisions on behalf of communities whose same freedoms and rights have been suppressed by the experience of forced displacement. RLO leaders are in the challenging position as interlocutors between the original donors, and the community recipients of aid and their varied rights and entitlements. 

Aid moves in a chain from the original donors via RLOs to the recipient communities and all three entities should be engaged creatively in the process. This is firstly inevitable, because unless donors have agency over the funding they choose to give, there is nothing to force them to give it (for better or worse). Secondly, it is fair that all three entities are able to express their own positions within the chain of aid, they have the right to be involved. Thirdly, in my opinion the re-balancing of injustices and inequities will be far more effective when we build up a sense of community. The donors should be invested not just in the transfer of funds, but invested in building understanding in and empathy for the causes they are supporting as a broader strategy for preventing some of the world’s problems. 

What should be the role of international organisations in this chain of funding? Too many organisations build their business model around taking a chunk of this funding as it makes its gradual way to refugee communities. When this chain has multiple nodes and bottlenecks we end up in a situation where far more aid is being spent propping up aid worker salaries than reaching refugee communities. Sometimes this is an implicit business model, such as fundraisers and project development teams being rewarded for their ability to generate income for their organisations. Other times this strategy is explicit, with phrases such as “we need our jobs too” being overheard in the sector.  

Instead the main priority should be to facilitate the flow of funds as directly as possible between original givers and refugee communities. For Cohere this would mean that when at all possible the funding should bypass our bank accounts and go directly from individual donor to refugee led organisation, and this is very much our approach, such as via www.reframe.network. 

A laudable additional example is Give Directly, the organisation that gives a one-off cash transfer to every household in a defined geographical area. They pool all funds they raise, with the clear explanation that donors are not choosing who the money is going to, because the funds will simply go to everyone in a village, district or refugee camp. This approach would appear at first glance to be even more efficient than Cohere’s in transferring funds to refugee communities, although in practice Give Directly have to use aggregators such as RLOs to help them identify all the households and make disbursements in refugee hosting areas. They also pool the funds at some, albeit comparatively efficient, cost and at the same time exclude the donor from any engagement in aid beyond the act of giving, something that I would argue does not help build a community based on solidarity. Conversely, the act of investing in social entrepreneurs could arguably be framed as an act of enhancing the agency of a community, by enabling innovators to build a platform that could grow to more than what a one-off cash transfer could achieve for a community, including scaling humanitarian funding or commercial investment in sustainable projects.

Another fascinating position is that of Adeso, the African NGO led by Degan Ali, who in turning down institutional aid from government donors have converted their annual revenue from a $25M+ NGO to a $3M revenue NGO, arguably achieving more for the sector in the process. Adeso goes further by urging the international aid community to stand back to allow local and national governments to lead the refugee response and all the service delivery of aid, urging them instead to use their large budgets to lobby the global north countries they are headquartered in to stop perpetuating global inequality.

I fully back Adeso in this line of advocacy. It would be shocking to imagine a large NGO providing all the services to refugees and asylum seekers in Europe,  rather than the state, so why should it be different in the global south? I also understand the logic and applaud the success of Give Directly in cutting out most of the inefficiencies in the flow of aid. However, I fear that both approaches could give an excuse for the privileged, those who are benefitting from an unjust and unequal global order, to think they are doing their bit and that topics like the global refugee crisis don’t directly affect them.

This is why at Cohere we are creating channels for donors to not only give towards refugee communities, but in the process learn more about the realities of forced displacement and about the people impacted by the inequalities of today’s world. Ultimately this will mean that donors have some influence over which organisations receive funding but they will also be more engaged with a worsening global refugee crisis. Now is not the time for giving a small portion of income and moving on with life, and it is not time for a display of power. There will be 117 million forcibly displaced people by the end of this year and before long the global refugee crisis will negatively affect everyone on the planet if it doesn’t already - this trend will only be reversed if we see ourselves as one community built on empathy and solidarity. Everyone has to be involved. 

To learn more about how Cohere is bridging the distances between refugee communities, refugee leaders and potential donors all over the world visit our website, and learn about the RLOs and their specific projects on www.reframe.network.