This year has ended on a real high for the Lotus Flower after our CEO Taban played a key part in the Global Refugee Forum in Geneva recently.
Held by UNHCR every four years, the Global Refugee Forum brings together decision-makers and stakeholders from around the world, including refugees themselves. It aims to find solutions and create individual pledges and actions for the world's refugees and the countries and communities that host them.
Taban was part of two multi-stakeholder pledges; the first one was ‘Gender Equality and Protection from Gender-Based Violence.’ Under this pledge, we are committed to creating a unique Peace Centre in Kurdistan, which will be funded locally by the German Federal Government BMZ, and will also be supported by the Kurdistan Regional Government's High Council of Women's Affairs.
Following an introduction by UNHCR High Commissioner Filippo Grandi, Taban made the big announcement about the pledge, and you can watch it here.
As an extension of our previous Peace Sisters projects, the Peace Centre will unite women from different faiths, ethnicities and backgrounds, promoting their peace and security and helping amplify their roles in leadership, mediation and conflict resolution. We’ve been working to secure support for the centre for a couple of years now, so it’s great that our goal is starting to take shape.
Secondly, Taban was a member of the Referencing Group which collaborated with ICVA and UNHCR to form a joint Multistakeholder Advancing Localisation Pledge. This is vital to ensure that local people and communities are involved and heard in all actions and responses around displacement and statelessness.
At a parallel event on advancing localisation, Taban was asked to deliver the closing remarks around this pledge, which you can see here. We were particularly pleased to hear Kelly T. Clements, Deputy High Commissioner at UNHCR stressing afterwards that this is exactly the approach that’s needed to bring lasting change.
Elsewhere during a busy week, Taban moderated a panel discussion which was called ‘Women As Agents of Change – Investing in Displaced Women's Local Solutions to Global Crises’. It was great to hear from Gillian Triggs, the Assistant High Commissioner for Protection at UNHCR, who spoke of Taban’s own “remarkable” impact - which you can see in this clip on our socials here.
Overall, the Global Refugee Forum was such an important event for Taban to be so heavily involved with, and we believe it shows just how far we have come as an organisation, and how much our work is now being recognised on the international stage.
We’ll of course keep you posted about our progress in 2024!