JLI Refugee & Forced Migration Hub – Roundtable 1 Event Summary

JLI Refugee & Forced Migration Hub: Roundtable Series

Between October and November 2023,  JLI Refugees & Forced Migration Learning Hub convened a series of three roundtables focusing on the intersections between faith actors and religion with capacity sharing, mental health and psychosocial support, and social cohesion interventions for refugees and forced migrants. The first session, which took place on 5 October 2023, focused on the topic of capacity building and capacity sharing with refugees and IDPs: case studies and lessons learnt.

Read summaries for the other roundtables here:

• Faith-sensitive and culturally-sensitive approaches to mental health and psychosocial support (MHPSS) for refugees and forced migrants
• Engaging with faith actors to support social cohesion for refugees and forced migrants

In this meeting, JLI brought together academics and practitioners to share their experiences of capacity building and capacity sharing with refugees and forced migration, and how these activities related to faith. The speakers include Atallah FitzGibbon (Islamic Relief Worldwide), Professor Emma Tomalin (Leeds University), Loida Carriel Espinoza (Tearfund Latin America and the Caribbean), and Dr. Jennifer Eggert (JLI). 

Atallah FitzGibbon, from Islamic Relief Worldwide (IRW), spoke about IRW’s ongoing involvement in the Welcoming the Stranger initiative, established over ten years ago by UNHCR and Religions for Peace. Following the launch of the Global Compact on Refugees in 2016, IRW came together with Lutheran World Federation (LWF) and Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS) to re-establish Welcoming the Stranger as a participatory, evidence-based forum. IRW, LWF, and HIAS convened a series of regional consultations with local faith actors to identify opportunities and challenges they faced in refugee response.

This culminated in the Welcoming the Stranger, Shaping the Future conference, which took place in Geneva, Switzerland in 2022, where faith actors and humanitarian practitioners engaged in knowledge exchange on the success and challenges faith based actors were experiencing in refugee response. Workshops were conducted on priority thematic issues such as mental health, partnerships, and more. 

IRW, LWF, and HIAS have now made a commitment to build on the learnings and commitments from the Welcoming the Stranger conference, by developing a resource for capacity-sharing for local faith actors on understanding and engaging with the humanitarian community. Atallah spoke of the capacity challenges experienced by local faith actors in humanitarian response – for example, the capacity to develop proposals to secure funding, or to scale up activities to meet growing needs during an emergency. Yet, he highlighted the critical capacities local faith actors did have:

“But what [local faith actors] do have, which is in many ways far more important in the long run, are the structures, support systems, volunteers, and resources to respond to the medium to long-term needs for refugee protection and integration”

Atallah FitzGibbon

The capacity-sharing programme would therefore support local faith actors to access the resources they needed to scale up their interventions for refugees and forced migration. Alongside this would be a capacity-sharing programme for international and national humanitarian actors to support their engagement with faith-based actors, and to help them understand the opportunity and value of engaging with faith actors. Now, IRW, LWF, and HIAS have committed to piloting this training in East Africa – ensuring that the resource is put directly into practice, and is able to capture innovative and inclusive practices.

Professor Emma Tomalin from the University of Leeds, shared her research on strengthening the capacity of local faith actors in humanitarian response in South Sudan. Similar to the proposal shared by Atallah FitzGibbon, the project aimed to equip local faith actors to respond quickly and effectively to humanitarian crises.

Professor Tomalin highlighted that despite the commitments to localisation made since the World Humanitarian Summit in 2016, and the expertise of local faith actors in particular, local faith actors continued to be poorly integrated into formal donor-funded humanitarian spaces. Professor Tomalin noted  the lack of trust between local faith actors and international humanitarian actors. Secular international humanitarian actors often perceived local faith actors as lacking professional capacity, organisational structure, reporting skills, financial management capability, or accountability mechanisms, with particular fears that faith actors may prioritise their own faith communities over others. Conversely, local faith actors perceived international humanitarian actors as remote and inaccessible, either favouring secular actors or actively hostile to religious actors. Moreover, local faith actors noted that international humanitarian actors did not always “practice what they preach” with regards to humanitarian standards.

“There was a lot of misunderstanding and lack of communication on both sides. So the aim of the project was to better integrate the local faith actors into formal humanitarian response through providing learning opportunities for them about the international humanitarian system, and also for international humanitarians about why and how to better engage with local faith actors.” 

Professor Emma Tomalin

The two-way capacity sharing model, called “Bridge Builders”,  included two main stages: first, humanitarian skills workshops for local faith actors, after which they received funding to set up their own projects to build capacity and demonstrate their ability to operate within the humanitarian system; secondly, faith literacy workshops for international secular humanitarian actors, strengthening their understanding of how to better partner with local faith actors. The programme’s theory of change relied on two-way capacity-strengthening, rather than top-down capacity-building – with a view to ultimately building stronger partnerships between international humanitarian actors and local faith actors.

As a result of the Bridge Builders programme, nine different organizations were awarded funding to set up pilot projects within their communities. Local faith actors felt they gained something and developed an awareness of the codes and frameworks that underpin the humanitarian system, and felt more confident using common terminologies in the humanitarian system. Critically, participants noted that the project helped to increase linkages between secular humanitarian actors as well as other local faith actors. 

However, Professor Tomalin noted two limitations of the project. The first was the sense that local faith actors were engaging in processes of “NGO-isation”, and the expectation that local faith actors needed to become more like NGOs to establish their own legitimacy. The risks of such a process include local faith actors losing their connection to local communities, as well as diminishing the broader functions they play in a community in order to focus more narrowly on humanitarian programmes. (1) Another limitation was the one-sidedness of the model, whereby there was a greater emphasis on training local faith actors to become like humanitarians, rather than creating an environment where international humanitarian actors meaningfully engaged with faith communities. Professor Tomalin noted the inherent power and resource structure of the humanitarian system in general, and the project in particular, as contributing factors to this disparity, and argued that greater efforts could have been made to challenge this dynamic.

Loida Carriel Espinoza from Tearfund Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) spoke of  Tearfund’s “As Born Among Us” network, which aims to build the capacity of Christian faith leaders to engage in advocacy and support for migrants. 

Loida shared how the LAC region is currently experiencing the largest migration movement in its history, triggered by multiple crises across the continent. Currently, millions of migrants representing 72 nationalities from across the world are crossing through the region. The scale of the migration crisis has led to systems collapse in many countries, as governments lack either the resources or political will to address the needs and impact of high-scale migration. Loida highlighted the numerous problems being faced by migrants, such as discrimination, lack of legal status in most countries, xenophobia (including from Christian leaders), lack of human rights, vulnerabilities to human trafficking, and the indifference of civil society and some faith communities. 

In response to these challenges, a coalition of churches and civil society organisations came together to form the “As Born Among Us” campaign (now a network). Based on Biblical traditions, the campaign promotes theological teachings which protect the rights of migrants, and builds awareness of the importance of welcoming migrants as a Christian duty. In the past three years, more than 300 local churches and 370 Christian organisations have participated in the network, while research from Church World Service suggests that more than 1000 across the LAC region are working to support migrants. 

The network supports churches and civil society organisations to strengthen their support for migrants, building their capacity to engage with organisations like the UN and IOM, as well as engage in advocacy for migrant rights in national and regional spaces. Tearfund, in partnership with a Christian seminary, developed a diploma programme to provide training to Christian leaders on how to attend to the needs of migrants at theological, humanitarian and advocacy levels. The diploma was completed by over 300 leaders from 16 countries.

“We have been working with [churches and Christian organisations] working with migrants in Latin America, trying to strengthen their work because they are the persons that receive migrants at the borders and in the transit cities too. For example, most of the churches don’t know how to work with the United Nations or the [International Organisation of Migration], or how to attend to policies for migrants”

Loida Carriel Espinoza

Loida highlighted a number of learnings and challenges from the campaign. Key strengths of the campaign included the way in which different kinds of churches were able to work together for a common cause, as well as the advocacy capabilities of network members. However, challenges included a lack of budget, the fatigue of Church leaders, a lack of connection between UN agencies and churches, as well as competing theologies on whether to welcome or exclude migrants.

Dr Jennifer Eggert spoke of JLI’s work on research capacity-sharing, which aims to support people with little or no research experience to be able to understand research, use research, and do research. Dr Eggert shared her experience working with a Syrian mental health NGO, Syria Bright Future, as part of JLI’s Syria Hub, to develop their own research on culturally-sensitive mental health and psychosocial support for Syrian refugees. 

“A lot of research capacity sharing is led by universities working with non-academic partners, but our approach is different. The aim of this kind of work is to challenge dominant forms of knowledge production. If you look at the kind of knowledge that is being produced on issues of development, forced migration and conflict, it’s often being produced by people who are not from the groups that they are writing about. This can be frustrating because these people have their own voice, they can do it themselves. 

Dr Jennifer Eggert

Dr Eggert highlighted that when research is not produced by the communities themselves, it can result in biases in the literature, where people are not represented accurately or fairly. Dr Eggert acknowledged the decolonial critiques of research capacity-building projects, which can often have a few problematic underlying assumptions – for example, the assumption that people offering the training (who tend to come from the Global North, or are academics) know better than the individuals and communities they are working with. Some research capacity building projects can also sometimes prioritise and value Western and Global North forms of knowledge, and imply that people from the Global South need to learn how to produce knowledge.

Dr Eggert emphasized how JLI’s approach intentionally focuses on “capacity-sharing”, as opposed to capacity-building, to acknowledge that learning is a two-way process – with both JLI and local faith actors offering different and complementary skills and expertise. Research capacity-sharing programmes consist of research training modules which explore what research is (and is not), how research can be beneficial to practitioners, activists and local communities, data collection tools and management, data analysis, and research outputs. Throughout the process, participants contribute their expertise on their context. Following the research training, JLI supports participants to develop their own independent research projects, engaging in regular collaborative planning and peer-to-peer support between programme participants. As a result of this programme, JLI’s Syria Hub, led by Syria Bright Future were able to produce a number of research publications on culturally-sensitive MHPSS for Syrian refugees.

JLI’s research capacity-sharing programme resulted in increased confidence of practitioners to not just produce their own research, but to critically engage with existing research. Participants also valued the participatory and two-way nature of the learning. However, the programme has been limited in the past by a lack of time and resources necessary to create meaningful and long-lasting change.

(1) Read more in Tomalin and Wilkinson, ‘NGO-isation, Local Faith Actors and ‘Legitimate’ Humanitarian Action in South Sudan, Journal of Humanitarian Affairs, 5:2 (2023) and Wilkinson et al, ‘Faith in localisation? The experiences of local faith actors engaging with the international humanitarian system in South Sudan’, Journal of International Humanitarian Action, 7(1):4, 2022