| Niger returns Sudanese to Libya. IRIN reports that since December, more than 1,700 Sudanese have fled from Libya to Niger – a reversal of the trend that has seen Agadez become a major transit hub for migrants and refugees travelling to Libya en route to Europe. On 2 May, a group of 160 Sudanese who had fled Libya were arrested in Agadez. UNHCR secured the release of women and children, but some 135 of the Sudanese were deported back to Libya this week. The deportations took place in the same week that UNHCR resumed life-saving evacuations of asylum-seekers from detention centres in Libya. Some 132 vulnerable men, women and children were flown from Tripoli to Niamey, Niger’s capital, on Thursday following a two-month suspension of the programme. Niger’s government has offered space for up to 1,500 refugees until they can be resettled to other countries. | | |
| Hundreds of thousands of children at risk of dying from hunger in Congo’s Kasai. UNICEF has warned that at least half of all children under five in the Kasai region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo are malnourished, including 400,000 who are at risk of death. The agency is urgently appealing for US$88 million to respond with half of the funds to be spent on child nutrition. Conflict in Kasai and elsewhere in the Congo has displaced millions of people within the country. Many families driven from their homes in Kasai have been unable to plant and harvest the crops they would normally rely on for survival. Congolese government forces regained control of most of Kasai area earlier this year and people are starting to return to their communities. Humanitarian access has also improved, but more donor support is necessary to cover the $1.7 billion the UN said was needed. | | |
| Devastating fire only latest hardship for Rohingya refugees in India. A fire that tore through an informal settlement in New Delhi last month has left 219 Rohingya refugees homeless. Local NGOs and neighbours have rallied to provide them with emergency shelter and aid, and UNHCR has re-issued refugee cards destroyed in the blaze. Reuters reports that India’s urban refugees often face suspicion and harassment and struggle to access jobs and basic services. India is a safe haven for more than 200,000 refugees, some 38,000 of whom are registered with UNHCR. | | |
| Funding dwindling to treat Syrian refugees with chronic diseases. The Intercept reports on the predicament of Syrian refugees in Jordan and Lebanon whose lives depend on receiving long-term specialized treatment that aid groups are increasingly unable to fund . As donor funding for Syria’s refugee crisis consistently falls short of humanitarian needs, specialized secondary or tertiary medical care is rarely a priority. Smaller aid groups and private donors have been funding treatment such as dialysis, but lack of donations for a dialysis programme for Syrian refugees in Jordan has already forced doctors to reduce treatments from three to two times a week. | | |
| Refugees delivering grassroots aid in Greece. At the height of refugee arrivals to Europe, foreign volunteers plugged gaps in the aid response on the Greek islands. Two years later, relief groups are increasingly dependant on refugee volunteers to sustain aid efforts. Dana Sachs, who was herself a volunteer with Humans4Humanity on Lesvos, writes that refugees’ involvement in aid delivery bodes well for the long-term sustainability of grassroots efforts, but is also indicative of how the situation in Greece has evolved from an emergency to a “chronic predicament”. Refugees forced to remain on the islands are often desperate for a meaningful task to fill their time. | | |
| Switzerland to test algorithm for distributing asylum-seekers. A pilot project will place 1,000 asylum-seekers around the country according to an algorithm developed by the Federal Technology Institute ETH Zurich and Stanford University. The researchers say that distributing asylum-seekers according to their algorithm, which places asylum-seekers according to their job skills, can increase their likelihood of gaining employment by 30 per cent. A control group of another 1,000 asylum-seekers will be distributed randomly among Switzerland’s cantons based on the current quota system. If successful, the data-based placement system could provide a model for other countries. | | |
| In this short film by The Guardian, refugees talk about how the reality of living in Europe has differed from their expectations. They no longer have to worry about their safety, but strange food, cold weather and loud public sneezing all take some getting used to. | | |
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