The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Mr. Filippo Grandi, and Prof. Stephen Kiama Gitahi, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Nairobi, officially inaugurated the Refugee Resource Centre (RRC), a landmark initiative aimed at addressing the challenges of forced displacement in Kenya and beyond. The Centre is envisioned as a beacon of hope and a catalyst for change, embodying the high-level vision and objectives of the Kenyan Government-led Shirika Plan.
The Centre, jointly supported by the University of Nairobi and UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, is set to bridge the gap between academia and practitioners on forced displacement, becoming a research hub that will feed into public policy and practice. It will hold dialogues, roundtables, lectures, and facilitate knowledge exchange on resilience and sustainable inclusion of refugees, asylum seekers, and host communities.
"The Refugee Resource Centre will generate evidence on solutions to forced displacement, dialogue and localised research, and this couldn't come at a more important time as Kenya leads the way with its Shirika Plan. With record numbers of displaced people worldwide, let's make connections between policy and practice and steer solutions to forced displacement, " said Grandi.
The establishment of the Centre is significant due to Kenya's pioneering transformative approach to refugee management, the Shirika Plan, which aims to transition refugee camps into integrated settlements and support the sustainable socio-economic inclusion of refugees and host communities.
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The Centre will undertake a range of activities, including socioeconomic research on forced displacement, facilitating the use of and creating new pipelines for the microdata library, organising policy dialogues, running a young leaders' program, facilitating the selection of research topics for students to encourage evidence generation on forced displacement, and organising an annual conference on the Shirika Plan.
A new collaborative agreement was also signed between the University of Nairobi and UNHCR, to make the Refugee Resource Centre a centre of excellence and a leading research lab in Kenya and beyond.
Following the launch, High Commissioner Grandi gave a public address on "Tackling forced displacement as a development challenge", discussing how to better empower displaced communities and strengthen host countries, fostering a future where displacement does not hinder progress, but becomes a catalyst for positive change. It is the third in a series of lectures by the High Commissioner on the global challenges of displacement of our time - including the need for a panoramic approach to mixed movements at the University of Melbourne in Australia last year, and addressing population flows in the Americas at Georgetown University in Washington DC earlier this month.
