Home Programs Five-Country Focus Focus on Five: A Window into Global Change for Refugees

Introducing the Women’s Refugee Commission Five-Country Strategy

The Women's Refugee Commission has decided to adopt a “five-country strategy” to more carefully focus our efforts on achieving change on the ground from what we’ve learned in our research and global assessments.

We have chosen to focus on five countries, selected because they represent different geographic regions, different displacement contexts (urban/camp, refugee/internally displaced/returnees, protracted displacement/newer emergencies/post-conflict reconstruction) and on the basis of our long-term experience in those countries. This does not mean that we will not visit other countries, but our ongoing focus will be on these five countries, which will provide case studies for ongoing global advocacy.

The five countries are: northern Uganda, Thai-Burma border, south Sudan (and Darfur), Liberia and Jordan. We will also include an emergency context, when an appropriate situation emerges, that we can track over time. The countries may be changed if the security situation does not permit frequent visits or if they are no longer helpful case studies for promoting our advocacy agenda.

Now that our areas of international work—reproductive health, gender-based violence, livelihoods, displaced youth, fuel and firewood and disabilities—are well-defined and unlikely to change in the near term, we can increase our attention on how we promote change—both in policy and practice—and how we monitor that change is in fact taking place and improving the lives of displaced women, children and young people.

For our international work, focusing on five countries enables us to:

• Collaborate and work intensively with local and international operational agencies in those countries, training them in the use of our manuals and guidelines, helping them design and implement programs and developing with them standardized indicators and monitoring and evaluation methodologies.
• Observe by repeated visits over time whether or not our recommendations for changes in policies and programs are being implemented and, if not, to understand the obstacles to change and revise our advocacy strategies.
• Use these five settings as a “window” into the bigger system, our fundamental goal still being that of systemic change at the global level with donors and policymakers.
• Have more sustained contacts with refugees, internally displaced people (IDPs) and returnees themselves.
• Develop relationships with local advocacy organizations, including refugee organizations, working to bring about these changes on the ground. We wish to experiment with advocacy “from top to bottom” of the system, with the Women’s Refugee Commission continuing its focus on “northern” advocacy targets such as the UN and U.S. government, but collaborating and assisting local nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that advocate with local governments, field-based UN agencies and INGOs, and regional bodies. From past missions in which we had only limited success in our efforts to strengthen local NGOs, we learned that such collaboration is critically important, but that it is unlikely to be successful without sustained face-to-face contact.

For our groundbreaking work in the U.S. on detention and asylum, the new “Focus on Five” helps us make stronger linkages between our international and domestic work.

The expected result?

• Improved effectiveness—capturing how our tools and recommendations are changing practice.
• Increased capacity to measure change.
• Enhanced accountability to stakeholders.
• Improved targeted, realistic recommendations and program outcomes.