Refugees in developing countries are struggling to survive on the assistance they receive. While this crisis has been precipitated by the aid cuts recently introduced by the US and other prosperous states, it is also a result of a long-term failure to ensure that refugees are able to establish their own livelihoods.
A disturbing trend
“Sudan refugees face deepening hunger.” “Malnutrition mounts in Kenyan refugee camp.” “Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh on the brink of starvation.” “From Angola to Uganda, Africa’s refugees face soaring hunger.”
Those are a few of the headlines that have appeared in the world’s media in the past few weeks. They all point to a disturbing trend: the inability of refugees in developing countries to find the food and other essential items that they need to survive. According to UNHCR, more than 11 million refugees and displaced people are now going hungry – a figure that excludes the 2 million Palestinian refugees who are starving in Gaza and who were supported by UNRWA until Israel made it impossible for that agency to function.
Why has this crisis arisen? The simple answer to that question is to be found in the growing number of mouths to be fed, coupled with the severe cuts that have recently been made to the aid budgets of the world’s richer states.
According to the UN’s Emergency Relief Coordinator, more than 300 million people are now in need of humanitarian assistance, unable to support themselves as a result of armed conflict, human rights violations, failures of political and economic governance and the impact of climate change. The number of refugees and displaced people around the world has doubled in the past decade, and now stands at over 120 million. Around 75 per cent of that number are to be found in low and middle-income countries.
In recent months, the funding available to support these vulnerable people has been dramatically reduced. Since the election of President Donald Trump, the US, traditionally the most important sponsor of humanitarian assistance, has halted almost all of the programmes previously administered by USAID, and has slashed its funding to other international aid agencies.
Governments in Europe are also cutting back. Belgium has reduced its aid budget by 25 per cent, the Netherlands by 30 per cent, France by 37 per cent and the UK by 40 per cent. In each of these cases, governments have argued that they need to redirect funding to their military and security budgets and to other activities that relate more directly to the pursuit of their national interests. As a result, UNHCR and the World Food Programme have been obliged to make sweeping reductions to their assistance budgets, in many cases providing regular rations only to the most vulnerable refugees.
False assumptions
The notion that aid cuts are uniquely responsible for driving refugees into hunger is a seductively simple one. But this narrative is also misleading, as it fails to take account of longer-term trends in the way that the international community has sought to meet the basic needs of refugees.
The contemporary refugee response system originated in the 1950s and 1960s, at a time when large numbers of people in the developing world were being displaced by liberation wars in colonial countries and by political violence in the world’s newly independent states. It was based on the principle of providing food, shelter and other essential relief items to newly displaced populations, with such emergency assistance operations funded by a small group of donor states and administered by UN agencies and international NGOs based in the Global North.
The underlying assumption of this approach was that such relief programmes could quickly be brought to an end, either because peace was restored in countries of origin, allowing the refugees to go home, or because they were able to settle into their country of asylum and soon be able to support themselves.
But this assumption proved to be false. In many cases, armed conflict and persecution in countries of origin dragged on for years, ruling out early refugee returns. At the same time, when confronted with the increasingly protracted refugee situations to be found on their territory, host states responded by introducing more restrictive asylum policies. In many cases, refugees in developing countries were herded into camps and confined there, denied access to land, the labour market and other livelihoods opportunities.
Through no fault of their own, refugees became dependent on long-term ‘care and maintenance’ relief operations, with aid agencies spending a large proportion of their funding on the complex and expensive logistical systems needed to deliver food and other essential items to a growing number of refugees.
Such arrangements were based on a tacit collusion between host countries, donor states and humanitarian agencies. Governments in developing countries were generally prepared to allow refugees to enter and remain on their territory, as long as the assistance they received was externally funded and if a proportion of those funds could be siphoned off to support their own bureaucracies.
UNHCR and other aid organizations found it operationally convenient to have refugees concentrated in large settlements, where they could be provided with the whole range of goods and services that they needed to survive. Donor countries were able to claim that they were respecting the principle of responsibility-sharing by funding refugee assistance programmes in the developing world.
This approach to refugee assistance, which has persisted to this day in many low and middle-income countries, did not entirely ignore the need for refugees to establish their own livelihoods and to attain a greater degree of self-reliance. But such efforts tended to be piecemeal in nature, often revolving around the establishment of small-scale farming and fishing projects, as well as the promotion of gender-specific trades: sewing and cooking for refugee women, carpentry and brickmaking for men.
Such initiatives were rarely based on a proper analysis of local market opportunities, were often underfunded, supported for a limited time and were usually unable to overcome the structural disadvantages experienced by refugees in terms of their access to basic rights and the means of production. Refugee camps and settlements, for example, were often located in remote rural areas with little development potential and where arable land was scarce.
A new paradigm
Recognizing the limitations of this model, periodic efforts have been made throughout the past 50 years to establish an alternative refugee assistance paradigm. All of these initiatives have been based on the notion of promoting the development of refugee-populated areas, with the intention of bringing tangible benefits to exiled and local communities alike. This would limit the need for refugees to receive long-term humanitarian assistance, reduce the risk of conflict between refugees and residents and enable the presence of refugees to become a development opportunity, rather than an economic burden.
Such initiatives have included the Second International Conference on Assistance to Refugees in Africa in 1984, UNHCR’s Development through Local Integration and Development Assistance to Refugees proposals in the 1990s, the same organization’s Protracted Refugee Situation Programme in the 2000s, and, most recently, the Global Compact on Refugees and its Comprehensive Refugee Response Framework, whose primary objectives include “enhancing refugee self-reliance” and “easing pressure on host countries.”
Despite the considerable effort devoted to these initiatives, their outcome has consistently fallen short of expectations. Many refugees have continued to be dependent on food aid and other forms of direct assistance, leaving them highly vulnerable to the cuts in international aid that have been introduced since the beginning of 2025. The UN and its member states have repeatedly endorsed the principle that refugees should be able to support themselves. But in practice, the anticipated shift to a new and developmental refugee response paradigm has been obstructed by a wide variety of factors.
These include: a never-ending sequence of new refugee emergencies that have absorbed the attention and resources of the international humanitarian system; the lack of experience and expertise possessed by UNHCR and its humanitarian partners in the field of self-reliance; and the differing mandates, priorities, working methods, partnerships and timeframes of emergency relief and development actors, and, as a result, their limited cooperation with each other.
Above all, however, the failure of this alternative paradigm has been rooted in the belief of many refugee hosting states that refugees who become self-reliant will be less likely to go back to their homeland, even if it is safe for them to do so, and that refugees who are allowed to work and establish livelihoods will deprive their own citizens of such opportunities. At the same time, such states have expressed limited interest in adopting a developmental approach to the refugee issue, preferring instead to have exiled populations supported by humanitarian assistance programmes paid for by the world’s industrialized states.
Progress and paralysis
Since the turn of the century, some progress has certainly been made in relation to refugee response. As a result of new technologies and information systems, aid agencies are faster and nimbler than they were previously. There has been a growing recognition of the need to support refugees in the flexible form of cash payments, rather than the cumbersome distribution of relief items.
Humanitarian organizations and host states have increasingly recognized that refugees might prefer not to live in camps, but to take up residence in cities, where the livelihoods opportunities are better and the way of life is more normal. Development actors have to some extent upped their involvement in refugee and displacement situations, especially when, as in Jordan and Lebanon, they involve countries that are perceived to be of geostrategic importance.
But in many respects, traditional approaches have prevailed, based on the notion that refugees should be provided with food and other forms of emergency relief, pending their repatriation. This model has, for example, been maintained in relation to the one million Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh, even though there is no prospect of their early return to war-torn Myanmar, and despite the fact that aid cuts have led to serious reductions in the rations that they receive.
The prospects for an improvement of the global refugee situation are not good. At a recent meeting in Geneva, the US government explicitly repudiated the Global Compact on Refugees. It has dismantled the country’s most important humanitarian assistance and development organization and is reducing its contribution to UNHCR, which has traditionally relied upon Washington DC for some 40 per cent of its budget.
While their actions are unlikely to be so far-reaching, other donor states are moving in a similar direction. With the paralysis that this is imposing on the international community’s response to the issue of human displacement, we can expect to see mounting levels of hunger, morbidity and mortality amongst the world’s refugees.
It is difficult to see how this gloomy scenario can be averted. Donor states seem unlikely to restore their humanitarian assistance budgets. Taking their cue from the restrictive border and asylum policies of the Global North, countries in the Global South have become increasingly hostile to refugees, in some cases forcing or inducing them to return prematurely to their country of origin. Beset by a financial crisis and political deadlock, the UN system is not well placed to counter these negative trends.
Rather than being allowed to support themselves and contribute to the economies of their asylum countries, refugees in developing regions may have no alternative but to go home, attempt to move on to more prosperous states, or simply to starve. Alternatively, the international community could finally recognize and act upon the need for refugees to support themselves, an approach that would limit the need for expensive assistance while allowing them to have productive and dignified lives.
About the author: Dr. Jeff Crisp is a Visiting Fellow at the Refugee Studies Centre, University of Oxford, former Head of Policy Development and Evaluation at UNHCR, and a volunteer with United Against Inhumanity (UAI).
The opinions expressed in this blog are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of United Against Inhumanity (UAI).
