The first Global Refugees Forum took place in Geneva

The first Global Refugees Forum took place in Geneva in December 2019. The forum comes at the end of a tumultuous decade in which the number of refugees has risen to over 25 million people worldwide. It is an event taken as an opportunity to translate the principle of international responsibility-sharing into concrete action.

Representatives of governments, international financial organizations, business leaders, humanitarian and development actors, refugees, and civil society representatives has secured wide-ranging and substantial commitments of support for refugees and the communities they live in, notably with important pledges of new long-term support for inclusion.

In all, over 770 pledges had been made from across the spectrum at the Global Refugee Forum, attended by some 3,000 participants, including refugees, and 750 delegations. These were in areas from employment, to places in schools for refugee children, new government policies, solutions like resettlement, clean energy, infrastructure and better support for host communities and countries.

The Bulgarian Chamber of Commerce and Industry through the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Bulgaria also presented a pledge titled: “Integration of refugees in the labour market through the implementation of the ERIAS Programme”.

The European Chamber (CCI) network, under EUROCHAMBRES’ coordination, is committed to contribute to the economic integration of refugees through its action programme entitled “European Refugees Integration Action Scheme”- ERIAS.

The ERIAS project partners from Belgium, Bulgaria, France, Greece, Italy and Spain underlined their goal to implement an intergation action scheme with multistakeholders approach and different results in the partnering countries meeting the problems and characteristics of the local migrant and labour market situation. Three Chambers of Commerce from Bulgaria are part of this European project: The Bulgarian CCI, Haskovo CCI and Stara Zagora CCI.

The pledge relates to the following actions:

The ERIAS project partners committed to report the results at stock-taking meeting in 2021.

For a complete list of pledges, see the dashboard here. Further pledges are expected in the near future and indicators to assess success, for example in jobs created, school places and reduction of poverty levels, have been established to track progress.

The Forum is a key element of the new Global Compact on Refugees that was affirmed by UN member states in New York in December 2018. Under the Compact, Global Refugee Forums take place every four years, meaning the next is scheduled for late 2023.