Dear friends and supporters,
We are excited to share an update on our progress over the last few months.
At Cohere, we are on a mission to ensure that refugees are able to decide their own futures, on their own terms. Our experience continues to teach us that this is possible through the work of refugee leaders and organizations across the world. Whilst our work has tended to focus on East Africa, we are now building networks across the African continent in countries including Nigeria, Malawi and South Africa, and beyond. In this exciting period of growth, we are proud to work with leaders who are delivering solutions and transforming their communities.
We now partner with over 36 refugee-led organizations (RLOs). In the last few months we have been delivering our award-winning Capacity Strengthening and Sharing course to 61 leaders and six different RLOs. With the support of donors we have been able to fund the ideas of over 38 RLOs who are developing programmes across education, agriculture and livelihoods.
Delivering solutions
In Kitengela, on the outskirts of Nairobi (Kenya), our partners Tenda Wema have built a learning hub to deliver lessons to young refugee and Kenyan children who are not able to access formal education.
In Kakuma Refugee Camp (Kenya), our partners Faulu, RAI and URISE are holding advanced ICT courses for students and are connecting them to online jobs and data entry work.
In Kampala (Uganda), our partners Bondeko are educating children and adults through Functional Adult Literacy and Early Childhood Development Classes, tailoring and bakery projects.
Our partners are demonstrating that when refugees hold the power and access to funding they can provide solutions to their communities, solutions that are efficient, effective and sustainable.
Creating platforms and building networks
One of the ways we are supporting more partners is through our platform, Reframe. Reframe is a networking website that enables refugee-led organizations to build profiles so they can promote their work, share resources, connect with other RLOs, and access direct funding from donors and supporters. We believe that by powering this type of platform networks can grow and more RLOs will have access to opportunities.
We are grateful for your ongoing support and we look forward to keeping you updated on our journey to transfer power to refugees, so their communities can be transformed.
Best wishes and thanks,
From the Cohere team and partners
A quick note
You may notice that our GlobalGiving page has not yet transitioned from Urban Refugees to Cohere - this is because we have been in the process of formally registering the organisation in the U.S. Thankfully this is nearly complete and as such the page will be updated in the coming weeks.
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Dear friends and supporters,
Since we last wrote to you, we have undergone some exciting new changes as an organisation.
At the beginning of March, we launched our new brand - COHERE.
The launch of COHERE marks the beginning of a new chapter in our work, and the coming together of Urban Refugees and Xavier Project. Rest assured that our mission and values remain the same. We are committed to working with refugees so they build better futures for themselves, on their own terms.
Cohere now partners with over 33 refugee-led organisations (RLOs) across urban and rural settlements in Uganda and Kenya. We have also started partnerships with refugee leaders in Malawi, South Africa and Nigeria. We support these organisations through capacity strengthening activities, coordination, funding and advocacy initiatives. We know that when refugees have the power to deliver their own solutions their communities can be transformed.
Through partnerships with RLOs more refugees can be supported in more efficient, relevant and sustainable ways. With over 100 million refugees worldwide, we believe this is how we tackle one of the biggest crises of our times.
We partner with organisations like YIDA (Youth Initiative Development Agency), an RLO based in Kyaka, in South West Uganda. YIDA run social enterprises, such as retail and financial services, which they use to fund and run a nursery school for over 600 children. They are also supporting other refugee-led organisations in the area through capacity strengthening trainings.
These initiatives are transforming communities and transforming refugees’ lives.
Refugees like Christine (47-year-old) who came across RLO, Tomorrow Vijana in Rwamwanja Refugee Settlement a few years after fleeing Congo with her family. She had no knowledge of English and was encouraged to join a savings group. Afterwards, the Tomorrow Vijana team began teaching English under a tree, while hanging papers on branches. What started as a savings group led her to learn and interact with different people. Christine now works as an outreach worker for Tomorrow Vijana, providing emotional and social support to refugee communities in Rwamwanja.
Christine says, “I encourage refugee families to join communities and organisations where they can learn. Either skills, languages or more since education does not have to end when one is a refugee. Finding a good support system is what we need and mine has been Tomorrow Vijana.”
When refugees have control over their own decisions, they make the best decisions.
It has been an exciting time of growth for our organization. We are so grateful for your ongoing support.
On the 20th June, as we celebrate World Refugee Day, GlobalGiving has chosen us for match funding. We’ll send out a reminder so that you can share the word about our work to your friends and family. Even a small donation can go a long way to help us on our mission.
Please head to our new Cohere website to find out more about our work.
We will soon be updating our GlobalGiving page to reflect these changes but we wanted to share this news first.
We will continue to keep you updated.
Best wishes from the Cohere team.
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Dear friends and supporters,
It has been an exciting start to 2022 as we joined forces with Xavier Project. Our coming together has already begun to bear fruit, both in our support to RLOs and in our advocacy work.
Together, we now support 23 refugee-led organisations (RLOs) throughout Uganda and Kenya, representing 200 refugee leaders, in a unified network. We are supporting them through coherent capacity-strengthening and sharing courses, and providing them with grants, which have more than doubled since last year.
These RLOs provide services and support to over 23 000 refugees in their communities, all of whom are able to live more fulfilled lives thanks to the important work of the leaders which represent them.
In particular, so far we have helped 428 refugee children (189 girls, 239 boys) with disabilities, living in camps and settlements, to access education opportunities. The large majority of them have known conditions, including cerebral palsy, the consequences of which can be limited if well taken care of. This is why, in partnership with refugee-led organisations, Xavier Project is supporting these children’s parents to better understand these disabilities so that they become competent responders to their children’s needs and confident advocates for their rights and well-being. In addition, we have been cooperating with schools and other institutions to raise awareness and facilitate access to education for these refugee children, and developing specific equipment for each child, using local material, designed to stick to dirt roads and requiring little maintenance. The changes in the parents’ mindset and the physical progress made by children, only a few months into the project, have already been incredible.
We have also started to work with the national network of RLOs in Malawi, a country which hosts over 50.000 refugees, to enhance their own representation of refugees leaders. As with the national RLO networks in Kenya and Uganda, we also aim to transfer to their leaders our capacity-strengthening and capacity-sharing expertise so that they may support their RLO members in their own work.
One of the objectives of us coming together with Xavier Project is also to advocate more strongly to donors and other stakeholders on the important role of refugee-led organisations in humanitarian crises. In December, we were invited to speak, on behalf of both organisations, to speak at a UNHCR event on Meaningful Participation to share our learnings and recommendations with over 200 participants representing governments, funders, national and international organisations (recording accessible here).
"Urban Refugees and Xavier Project do partnerships in a different way, like no one else. They respect us. And with respect, we can really make a difference." John Bolingo, President of Uganda's National RLO Network (RELON)
The last phase of our coming together with Xavier Project will see us launch our new brand, at the beginning of March. We can’t wait to share it with you ! Stay tuned.
Dear friends,
We are extremely grateful for your support to Urban Refugees. It has been key in allowing us to adapt our actions to the needs of refugee leaders, to best support their own organisations and amplify their voices.
Building on this, we are taking a new step for impact by joining forces with another organisation, the Xavier Project. Our 2 organisations, which have been working together in East Africa for many years, share the vision that refugees should be at the forefront of humanitarian response, to enable them to truly become actors of their own lives. And we believe that this goal can be better achieved by pulling together our expertise, networks and resources, with the creation of a single entity.
In this report, we tell you more about this exciting opportunity, and give you some updates from the past few months in Uganda and Kenya.
Enjoy !
Urban Refugees (UR) was created in 2012 to draw attention and aid to refugees in cities. Xavier Project was founded in 2008 in the UK, Kenya and Uganda to promote community-driven education projects.
Through extensive collaboration with refugee leaders and refugee-led organisations, both of our organisations have progressively adapted their programs and advocacy to focus on strengthening RLO capacities and improving their access to funding. Together, we support a total of 26 RLOs in Kenya and Uganda.
Our 2 teams have been working informally together for some years to share best practices, finding increasing synergies and complementarities in our programs and approaches. In September 2021, we decided to fully mutualise our resources and expertise for the benefit of our partner RLOs and of the communities they serve, by merging the 2 organisations. By the end of the year, we will therefore constitute a single entity, temporarily under the name Xavier Project, with unified teams, programs and funding.
Through this, we aim to accelerate the elevation and shift of both power and funds to RLOs, so that refugees may decide for themselves how to lead their own lives and find solutions to the difficulties that they face.
We would love for you to continue supporting us as we drive this change, which will ensure that your donations are even more impactful to communities.
When a national lockdown was declared in June 2021 in Uganda, it put a stop to all in-person training to our partners, and to training altogether for leaders with little digital skills or access to computers. Our team worked remotely to support refugee leaders to implement their contingency plans, which had been elaborated during preceding months, so as to best address the needs of their community members.
We were also able to shift some funding from training to cash grants for 2 partner organisations led by women refugees: Refugee Entrepreneurship Association Limited (REAL) and Sudanese Women for Peace and Development Association (SWPDA).
In both RLOs, it clearly appeared that their members most affected by the lockdown were those with health problems, as they had even less access to healthcare and stopped all activities to protect themselves. As a result, cash grants were distributed to 90 refugee and Ugandan women, which they used for their most pressing needs (including food, medicine, hospital bills, etc.); this benefitted indirectly to over 400 dependents.
Eltoma, as a member of SWPDA, was one of the recipients of these gash grants. She is a Sudanese refugee and has been living in Bunga, near Kampala, for 9 years. She manages a mobile henna business and suffers from hypertension. "The interruption of public transport was terrible, as I could not gain any money with my henna business. On priority, I bought food for my 5 children and medicine against my hypertension using money from the business. Thanks to SWPDA, I was able to go see a doctor to get help, and buy food for my family.”
After the successful refugee-led advocacy training in Kampala, we trained 30 refugee leaders in June 2021 in Nairobi, in partnership with Amnesty International.
For 2 weeks, participants worked to define an advocacy strategy and workplan for their organisations. This led to the creation of a task team of 10 refugee leaders, aiming to support RELON Kenya, the national network of RLOs, in advocating on behalf of its members. Their overall objective is to enhance refugee participation in decision making.
In the coming months, this team will work to influence the Refugee Bill 2019, currently under discussion at the Kenyan Parliament, so as to defend the validity of refugee IDs within the Kenyan system and to increase refugee access to higher education. We will be supporting them through a 6-months coaching programme, so that they can pursue this work in the long run and train other refugee leaders to advocate for themselves.
We look forward to telling you about this, as a new organisation, in the next report !
As Uganda faces an unprecedented number of Covid-19 cases, the governement has just announced a new lockdown which should last for several weeks. Over 80 000 refugees in Kampala face, once again, huge sanitary, social and economic risks.
Yet this comes at a time when humanitarian funding to the Covid-19 pandemic response continues to decrease. More than ever, RLOs have a key role to play to address the most pressing needs of their communities - we just need to help them do so.
Stronger RLOs to face new Covid-19 wave
The 4 RLOs which were supported as part of our Covid-19 emergency response from July 2020 to March 2021 have each developped a contingency plans in case of a new crisis. One of the major learnings from this was that emergency assistance and services should be much more individualised, so as the address the specific needs of each member of the community - as a result of the lockdowns, some may need food, other medical protection, etc. As this new wave hits the country, our team in Kampala will help RLO leaders to implement their contingency plans, so as the best address the needs of their community members.
Thanks to the income-generating activities which they were able to launch early 2021, with Urban Refugee grants, our RLO partners will now be able to provide additional support to their members.
They can also rely on the partnerships (including referral systems) which were built during the pervious period to provide emergency aid and services to their members - including distribution of food, sanitary items, etc.
During this period, the other ongoing Incubation courses will either be delivered online (with data costs covered by Urban Refugees) or suspended until the end of the lockdown - based on the capacities and requests of the RLOs currently in the Program.
Refugees speaking out for themselves
Although the key role of RLOs in crisis responses is progressively being recognised by the international community, refugee leaders are still often spoken of on their behalf. This is why we have been working so hard on our advocacy training for RLOs !
Following Covid-19 restrictions in Nairobi, where this training was initially intended to be launched, we decided to test it with our RLO partners in Kampala in March and April this year - as they too were eagier to develop their advocacy strategies. Over the course of 6 weeks, 29 RLO representatives worked on defining their advocacy objectives and on buiding strategies adapted to each of their 3 organisations. Our advocacy coordinator then provided remote support to help them finalise their strategies and share it with relevant stakeholders.
As a result, we also collected great stories to give the floor to refugee leaders themselves, on their needs, hopes and dreams.
Now they need you to make them heard !
Please follow and share their stories throughout Refugee Week (June 14th - June 20th) on our social networks !
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