Paper long abstract:

The resilience of refugees in Africa has been well documented over many years. The idea of refugees as passive victims of war dependent on the benevolence of international aid has been discredited through research and rejected by many, if not most, aid organisations. The agency of refugees is commonly acknowledged in the rhetoric of such organisations, whose policies and programme documents are suffused with terms such as 'empowerment', 'participation', and 'capacity building'. Despite these good intentions, the refugees' own strategies for coping with their situation are still neglected and often undermined through the aid programmes which set out to help them. This paper highlights two of the stubborn obstacles which stand in the way of aid practice catching up with its rhetoric.

First, the acknowledgement of refugees' agency in actively pursuing their interests tends to remain at quite a generalised level. Aid organisations working with refugees, especially in the temporary settings of camps and settlements, rarely have the capacity to analyse and respond to the coping strategies adopted by different refugees in a particular context. They know they should work with and build on refugees' strategies, but they do not necessarily know what those strategies are.

Second, the 'aid architecture' militates against programming which is driven by refugees' initiatives. Work with refugees is often associated with emergencies and attracts short-term funding. Many donors emphasise the importance of rapid and visible results which encourages aid agencies to force the pace of activities and take the credit for results. As a result, refugees are the object of many aid interventions which fly in the face of good development practice.