The International Rescue Committee (IRC) is extremely concerned about escalating tensions and hostilities in Ethiopia’s northern Tigray region, where many refugees, displaced families, and local communities are reeling from a year of multiple humanitarian disasters.

In partnership with ECHO the International Rescue Committee is supporting over 21,000 displaced Malian, Nigerian and Nigerien children aged 6 to 11 to access a quality education, and is meeting the ever growing need for schooling resources.

Women and girls make up half of all refugees and people displaced by crisis worldwide, and an estimated 225 million women living in developing countries are in need of contraception.

Today’s refugee crisis poses serious challenges to the international order. Conflict and crisis have pushed some 21 million people to seek refuge outside their home countries, including 5 million who have fled Syria since the civil war began in 2011. Approximately 76 percent of refugees live outside of camp settings, making it even more difficult to locate and reach them with essential services. Furthermore, protracted displacement has become the “new normal.” Refugees now spend an average of 10 years away from their homes, and for refugees displaced more than five years, the average is 21 years.

"Every day we see the numbers grow," says Marian Hassan Mohamud. She is referring to the one million plus people in Somalia who have been displaced from their homes by drought, hunger and war.

Today, more than half of the world’s 59.5 million forcibly displaced people live in urban areas and their average length of displacement is over a decade.2 In Asia, the world’s fastest urbanizing continent, countries like Iran and Pakistan are among the top-10 major refugee-hosting countries in the world, while Afghanistan remains the second largest source of refugees globally behind Syria.3 In Southeast Asia, Thailand serves as the region’s primary destination for refugees and asylum seekers, with over half a million people of concern living in the country in 2015. These trends have significant implications for cities within the region, including heightened challenges for providing basic services to the city’s existing inhabitants as well as new residents. They also impact the changing humanitarian landscape, where traditional humanitarian responses have been most often designed for camp or rural/remote contexts. In order to better understand these issues, to learn from challenges and successes, and to identify more appropriate ways of working, the International Rescue Committee (IRC) and the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) hosted an Urban Practitioner Workshop on Meeting Needs in a Context of Urban Displacement in Asia. The aim of the workshop was to bring together humanitarian, international development, community organizations, and local municipal actors called into action by various urban crises within the region.