Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire — More than 300 attendees are expected at the headquarters of the African Development Bank in Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire for the third edition of the Africa Resilience Forum (ARF), which is to be held from 4-6 March, 2019.
This year's forum is themed: Fragility, Migration and Resilience."
The Forum will enable participants, which will include senior members of governments, representatives of international organizations, leading members of civil society, academics and businesspersons, to discuss the ongoing challenges posed by migration - security, youth unemployment, gender issues, and the effects of climate change.
In 2016, figures from the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) showed that more than 21.3 million people were forced to migrate from their places of residence.
The third edition of the Africa Resilience Forum, organized in partnership with the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC), will be a unique platform for participants from different backgrounds to share their experiences. It will also offer a space to consider the considerable opportunities offered by migration as a catalyst for development and a source of sharing of social values between the countries of origin, transit and destination.
A plenary specifically dedicated to "innovative solutions in the field of migration," including financial solutions, will be used to highlight how poverty and lack of employment prospects are becoming powerful drivers of migration and instability.
Migration, security and development will be at the heart of discussions at another plenary session during which participants will discuss smuggling of migrants and the impact of tightened border controls with the objective of laying prevailing myths about migration to rest.
Migration within the African continent will be discussed during a parallel session entitled "Intra-African Migration: Challenges and Policies," while yet another workshop will focus on "Climate Change, Migration and Building Resilience."
The debates held during this edition of the Resilience Forum will benefit from input from the new Country Resilience and Fragility Assessment (CRFA) tool, which seeks to determine the internal and external pressures on countries and their capacity to address this issue.
Developed in 2018 by the African Development Bank, the CRFA introduces, for the first time in the history of fragility and resilience evaluation tools, the criteria of "effects of regional contagion" and "climate change."
Six plenary sessions and nine parallel workshops will offer participants the chance to identify the best initiatives to address fragility and to build resilience through appropriate responses to the challenges of migration.
Official hashtag: #ARF2019
Keywords: #migration #resilience #Africa