On Tuesday, June 20, Rwanda will join the international community to celebrate World Refugee Day, a day dedicated to honour people who have been forced to flee their home countries.

Currently hosting more than 100,000 refugees, Rwanda is one of the countries that are playing a role in promoting their right to seek safety, promoting their social inclusion, as well as advocating for solutions to their plight.

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Ahead of the celebrations, The New Times’ Hudson Kuteesa sat down with Ndèye Aissatou Masseck Ndiaye, the country representative of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) Rwanda, a UN agency mandated to aid and protect refugees, forcibly displaced communities, and stateless people.

The conversation covered a number of topics including the welfare of refugees in Rwanda, challenges they face, among others

Read the excerpts below:

First, tell us about World Refugee Day and its significance?

World Refugee Day was established by the UN General Assembly in 2000 and first observed in 2001 in the context of the 50th anniversary of the UN Refugee Convention. For UNHCR and our partners, it is a day for us to renew our commitment and reaffirm our solidarity with the refugees, as we continue to shed light on their rights and needs. Above all, we aim to mobilize political will and resources to address forced displacement challenges.

This year’s edition of the celebrations is under the theme "Hope Away from Home.” Why was this theme chosen?

We are looking towards solutions for refugees.

Refugees can find hope through a different range of means; and we can all do more to give refugees more hope – and more opportunities – while they are away from home. Including refugees in the communities where they have found safety after fleeing conflict and persecution is the most effective way to support them in restarting their lives and enable them to contribute to the countries hosting them.

It’s also the best way to prepare them to return home and rebuild their countries, when conditions allow them to do so safely and voluntarily, or to thrive if they are resettled to another country. Let’s commit to including refugees in our schools, workplaces, health care systems, and beyond.

In Rwanda particularly, we are thankful to the government policies. They have been generous and very inclusive. I think those are elements that give refugees the possibility to hope for a better future.

So, I think this year it is important that we celebrate that, and we make sure that the world knows that the refugees need to feel included. That is how hope can be nurtured.

What is the refugee situation in Rwanda?

Rwanda is a country that has been hospitable to more than a hundred thousand refugees who have been here since the early 1990s. Rwanda right now is hosting about 130,000 refugees and asylum seekers. We have recently seen new arrivals from eastern DRC. About 7,500 refugees crossed the border into Rwanda, fleeing violence, conflicts and persecution in that part of the DRC since the end of last year.

Most of the refugees hosted here in Rwanda are living in camps that are designated by the government over the past 20 years or so. Some of them – a minority, live in cities, particularly urban settings like Kigali and Huye.

Interestingly, most of these refugees are coming from the neighbouring countries – Burundi and DRC, as I mentioned earlier. They are a population fortunately that can easily integrate themselves in Rwanda because they have similar languages as Rwandans and have similar cultures.

On top of those two nationalities (Burundians and Congolese), we have other nationalities, particularly those that have been evacuated from Libya. We have hundreds of such people hosted at the Gashora transit center as we search for durable solutions for them.

The transit centre has been put in place through a cooperation between the African Union, the government of Rwanda and of course the UNHCR. It is really a joint lifesaving program.

UNHCR has talked about challenges it faces in terms of insufficient funds. Elaborate more on that and other challenges that you may be facing.

Talking about the challenges, funds come as number one. With all the needs that we need to address, we would be in a better position to do so, if we had more funding to support the government to support them (the refugees), to support our partners to support them, and even ourselves.

Particularly when it comes to UNHCR Rwanda, this year our funding is more than critical. For all the needs that we assessed, less than 30 percent of our funding tasks have been covered. And we are only in the middle of the year. So you can imagine that this is a very low level for us to be in position to address the needs that have been assessed since last year.

If we talk about the Rwandan context, there are critical areas where both UNHCR and the Government of Rwanda have identified serious gaps in food, energy, health, and education assistance.

For example, in health, if we don’t have enough funding, UNHCR may face a situation where by August we won’t be able to address the refugees’ medical needs.

We have refugees who have been here for up to 20 years. What do you think can be the solution for their situation?

What the UNHCR usually does is to pursue solutions for them. The best solution for them is always to return to their home countries, but when that takes place there are principles to observe to make sure that they return to an environment where security has come back durably.

Also, their return must be voluntary. If people feel that they are not safe enough to go back, we cannot force them.

We also have other durable solutions such as integrating them where they are. We know that more than 40 percent of the Congolese refugee population in Rwanda were born in Rwanda because they have been here since the early 1990s.

Let’s talk about the asylum seekers that Rwanda is continuing to receive from Libya. How are they being assisted?

I think the first thing to say is to praise the government of Rwanda that is bringing solutions for those who have been trapped in Libya. Since 2019, we have evacuated about 1,600 to Rwanda. More than 1,000 of these have managed to go to a third country for resettlement.

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When they come here, it is a lot of coordination work between Libya where they are coming from, UNHCR, our partners, and the government of Rwanda. We are providing basic assistance to all refugees, but also put particular focus on psychological support, because we know that most of them have had very difficult journeys in Libya.

Their stay in Rwanda is on a temporary basis. As UNHCR, we support searching for a third country resettlement solution for them. We prepare them so that they will have skills that can help them to integrate when they arrive in those countries that have accepted them.

What is the Global Refugee Forum, and what does UNHCR hope to achieve in the upcoming forum in December?

The Global Refugee Forum (GRF) followed a year after the historic adoption of the Global Compact on Refugees. The GRF is a huge opportunity to build momentum on the implementation of the Compact and strengthen the collective response to refugee situations. The work of the GRF feeds into the SDGs and the agenda of leaving no one behind, with its goals set for 2030.

At the last GRF in 2019, Rwanda made the highest number of pledges to support refugee inclusion in the region.

These pledges were in areas such as education, environment, and livelihoods. Many of them have now been completed. At the upcoming GRF in December 2023, we hope to build on these pledges to further refugee inclusion in Rwanda. There might not be as large a number as last time, but we want to ensure that the commitments made by the Government of Rwanda are maximized to the largest extent.

From our own perspective, we are also eager to engage more with the private sector to see how they can support refugees from creating job opportunities, to supporting innovative solutions to the challenges we are currently facing.

How do you see the future of refugees in Rwanda, say in the next five to ten years?

If we are talking of a horizon of five to ten years, yes, we could foresee some improvement, particularly for the Burundian population. We know that since 2020, half of the population of Burundian refugees has gone back home. There is work to be done, but I think Burundi is on the right path.

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It is a little bit difficult to project the situation for refugees from the DRC, where we continue to receive new arrivals on a daily basis. I can say that recently we had a tripartite meeting where UNHCR facilitated a conversation between the two states.

Rwandan and Congolese officials met in Geneva and started discussions on how we can revive the tripartite agreement for the voluntary return of Congolese refugees. We remain hopeful from this first step; as initial discussions took place. We are also going to meet at the technical level, to talk about the modalities and feasibility of voluntary returns. For UNHCR, security and peace must come back to refugees’ country of origin to allow safe, voluntary and durable returns.