Egypt - IOM is participating in this week’s regional consultations in Amman, Jordan in the run up to next year’s World Humanitarian Summit in Turkey.

The first World Humanitarian Summit, an initiative of UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, will bring together governments, humanitarian organizations, people affected by humanitarian crises and the private sector to propose solutions to the most pressing humanitarian challenges. It will also set an agenda to keep humanitarian action fit for the future.

The three-day consultations in Amman will begin today (3/3) and run until 5th March. The regional consultations will gather practical and grassroots insights within the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) by tapping into the experience of practitioners across the humanitarian spectrum to help shape and improve future humanitarian interventions.

IOM will join other humanitarian actors to provide comprehensive localized insights, identifying gaps in assistance and make recommendations about how to address current inefficiencies and shortcomings within humanitarian response.

Discussions will range from emergency preparedness and financing to protection of civilians, protracted crises and displacement, localizing humanitarian response and humanitarian access.

The MENA region has long been a place of destination, transit, and origin for migrants seeking safety, protection and opportunities. Consequently the movement of people is high on the agenda of the Amman consultations.

The consultations for MENA come at a time of acute conflicts, protracted instability and political fragmentation facing the region. Current crises in Libya, Sudan, Yemen, Syria and Iraq have forced the displacement of millions of people. 

From January 2014 through 12 February 2015, IOM’s Displacement Tracking Matrix (DTM) identified nearly 2.5 million displaced people across Iraq, while in January alone, IOM’s response to the Syria crisis reached over 300,000 people, including distribution of non-food items and provision of health care. 

“We face the challenge of connecting development and humanitarian action: this includes disaster preparedness and strengthening resilience to reduce forced migration,” said Pasquale Lupoli, Director of the IOM MENA Regional Office in Cairo. “There is also need for development-led humanitarian responses, especially in some of the protracted crises we see in the MENA region.”

IOM will continue to reach out to vulnerable migrants who are often overlooked by current humanitarian programming. In the region, migrant workers stranded in countries engulfed in crisis often need urgent assistance.

IOM is currently helping to evacuate a group of 401 Senegalese to return home from Libya as the Libyan conflict escalates. It has helped almost 200,000 stranded migrants to leave Libya since violence erupted there in 2011.

Another IOM area of concern in the region is the incidence of human trafficking among crisis-affected and displaced populations. In 2013, IOM assisted about 1,000 trafficking victims in the Middle East and North Africa.

“The Syria crisis has raised concerns about women and children being trafficked for sexual exploitation and forced marriage,” says Sarah Craggs, a regional specialist at the IOM MENA Regional Office.

“Accounts of women, men, children, and migrant workers in countries hosting Syrian refugees becoming victims of forced labour or other human rights abuses, including trafficking in persons, are rarely discussed,” she adds.

At the regional consultations in Amman, IOM will be focusing its recommendations on what can be done to render migrants less vulnerable in emergency situations, including the specific prevention of human trafficking in times of crises.

IOM believes that humanitarians need to work together with civil society, State and non-State actors to find effective approaches to comprehensively address factors that may lead to new forms of exploitation against mobile populations in times of crisis.

For more information, please contact IOM Cairo

Martina Salvatore

Tel: +20 2 27365140/1/2 Ext. 314

Email: msalvatore@iom.int

or

Sarah Craggs

Tel: +20 2 27365140/1/2 Ext. 308

Email: scraggs@iom.int