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FMR 64 COVID-19: early reflections 75

June 2020 www.fmreview.org/issue64

YARID/Patrick Makombe

YARID staff delivering food during the pandemic to vulnerable refugees in Kampala, Uganda.
from the functioning of boreholes to At a global level, refugees are coordinating
school attendance and birth registration, their responses, and there are growing voices
and communities could use these to play of support for responses ‘by refugees for
a key role in supporting virus tracking. refugees’ during the pandemic. The starting
2
point needs to be the building of a coalition
Supplementing capacity gaps: With many of people willing to take this seriously – one
senior humanitarian staff absent from that includes refugee-led organisations,
refugee camps and aid budgets under threat, donor governments, foundations, NGOs
many social services in camps may become and academics. Its focus should be on
stretched. Local staff and volunteers have mapping organisational capacity, building
an important role to play in finding ways best practices, and piloting new delivery
to deliver essential services like education, mechanisms to get resources into the
food distribution and water and sanitation hands of frontline providers. Donors may
under social distancing measures. need to be willing to accept higher levels
of risk and reduce compliance standards.
Influencing social norms: In wealthier Most government donors worry about
countries, governments are widely accountability to their own electorates,
using behavioural economics to design and this has been a particular issue in
interventions to shape social compliance Uganda. Private money and pooled funds
with public health policies. They have may be necessary to mitigate risk while
access to big data and eminent social piloting new funding mechanisms.
scientists to design responses adapted to Historically, there has been a glaring
the cultural context. This approach is not asymmetry of power at the heart of
readily available in many humanitarian the international refugee system. The
settings. In refugee camps, for instance, participation of refugees, let alone their
shaping social norms relies on building organisations, has rarely been encouraged. In
community-level trust – and working the current crisis, there are strong imperatives
proactively with refugee-led organisations to change this as a matter of necessity,
may be the best available option of doing so. particularly as the world faces the likely