For five years, this Medium page has been home to UNHCR Innovation’s stories, ideas, and lessons learned — and we’re so grateful you’ve been here with us for the ride.

We’re very excited to share that we’ve now launched a new home for our articles: the Stories & Insights section of our recently refreshed website.

You can find this section here: https://www.unhcr.org/innovation/stories-insights-across-our-work

Going forward, all new content from across our workstreams will be published there, where you’ll also find our full archive of past articles in one place.

This move isn’t just about a new address. It’s about building a space that’s truly ours — one designed to grow alongside the work we do and the communities we’re part of. In this new space, you’ll find everything you loved here, and more: our stories (with easy filtering and search options) as well as smooth navigation among insights, projects, and other information about our work.

As soon as we conclude the migration of content, this Medium page will be retired.

You can also follow us on X and LinkedIn to hear about new stories and other updates on our activities.

Thanks again for reading, engaging, and being part of our community. See you on the new site!

Exciting news: We’re moving! was originally published in UNHCR Innovation on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

It’s hot, dry and dusty in Tongogara refugee settlement, southeast of the Zimbabwean capital of Harare — except when it’s flooding. Over the past 20 years, the camp’s population expanded rapidly, and it now hosts around 22,000 people, driving demand for local resources. The expansion of essential agricultural fields increased contact with wildlife, while the need for fencing to protect those fields from livestock damage led to more logging. This contributed to deforestation that has exacerbated the camp’s vulnerability to extreme heat, cyclones, and heavy rainfall — all of which are due to intensify with climate change.

Young refugees in the settlement identified these challenges — and chose to act. These activists formed the Refugee Coalition for Climate Action (RCCA) in 2020 and started planting trees, picking up trash, and raising awareness. In 2024, with support from UNHCR’s Environment and Climate Action Innovation Fund, RCCA took the lead on trialling a nature-based solution to resolve the challenge of how to protect their livelihoods — propagating, selecting, then planting out, with the help of farmers, 3,000 cactus and sisal species to create a 3.2km-long (and counting!) thorny barricade around precious cropland.

On the frontlines

“Climate change is affecting everyone everywhere, but in very different ways,” says Tala Budziszewski, who leads UNHCR’s Environment and Climate Action Innovation Programme. “For refugees, its devastating impacts are a daily reality.” As detailed in UNHCR’s No Escape reports, three in four people forced to flee live in countries facing high or extreme exposure to climate-related hazards. Nearly all refugee camps are projected to face a future of extreme heat.

These climate-related risks have a significant impact not only on displaced people, but also on UNHCR’s efforts to protect them and achieve solutions. UNHCR has set an ambitious goal of reducing the number of refugees living in protracted displacement and reliant on humanitarian assistance by 50 percent by 2035. But in early 2025, half of all returnees returned to climate-vulnerable locations. “You can’t talk about long-term solutions and self-reliance, key to delivering our mandate, without considering how climate is affecting the places refugees live in or might go to,” Tala says.

UNHCR’s role, as she sees it, is at multiple levels: Working with refugees to ensure they have the tools necessary to adapt to how climate change affects their lives, choices, and opportunities; and ensuring they can participate and are included in adaptation planning, financing and decision making, to help shape these processes in a way that responds to their lived experiences.

New solutions to enduring challenges

Innovation is essential to adapt and respond to the heightened risks of climate change in contexts of forced displacement. UNHCR Innovation’s programming aims to nurture new solutions in this space as well as supporting the groundbreaking contributions refugees are making in this space.

“Refugee-led organizations like RCCA are doing remarkable work in frontline communities yet with limited financial resources,” says Gawaar Juich, Director of RCCA. “It is time RLOs receive adequate support — either through direct donor funding or meaningful partnerships”. UNHCR’s climate action innovation work is about creating the enabling environment for those locally initiated innovations to grow.

Climate action led by communities

Supporting inclusive climate action, driven by communities, starts with ensuring refugees are involved right at the beginning, in defining the challenge. This ensures climate action responds to real needs, as in Zimbabwe, rather than simply imposing a generalized idea of what a climate solution should look like.

One thing this process reveals time and again is that, while climate change impacts are often thought about on a long timeframe, communities are being affected in the here and now. Their key concerns often centre on, for instance, how climate and environmental hazards shred their incomes and limit the choices available to them. To respond to these concerns, climate-positive programming must deliver on meeting basic needs in equitable and inclusive ways.

That’s why, in Zimbabwe, RCCA is working with UNHCR to protect farmers’ livelihoods using a solution that will also reduce climate vulnerabilities. The biofencing project also promoted gender inclusion, ensuring women were key decision-makers. “Their participation not only contributes to the success of the initiative but also enables them to earn a monthly income, helping to support their families and improve household stability,” says Gawaar.

Investing strategically to support protection

Delivering on UNHCR’s mandate to protect and include people forced to flee requires addressing not only the immediate impacts of the climate crisis, but also ensuring solutions create protective environments. “Activities focused on environmental regeneration and green skills have been key entry points for bringing refugee and host communities together and showing that refugees can contribute to building better futures for everyone” Tala says. In Zimbabwe, refugees and host community farmers worked together to protect common agricultural lands. Participants are now sharing the solutions with their peers, who have begun replicating it in their own kitchen gardens.

Through pilot initiatives in, so far, more than 27 countries, UNHCR Innovation generates evidence about how new climate action approaches can work — and how they can be adapted, replicated, or scaled to maximize their impact. “Our work, as Innovation, is really about developing that proof of concept, showing that these solutions not only deliver environmental benefits, but they solve the priority challenges of refugees in a financially sustainable and feasible way,” Tala says.

Navigating challenges

Despite the diverse benefits of community-led climate action, the path toward mainstreaming successful new approaches is far from simple. “The humanitarian funding cycle is not very conducive to innovating in this space,” Tala points out, “because a lot is expected to be delivered in a short space of time. And there are some processes that you simply cannot speed up.” Monitoring and evaluation of climate action projects is complex, with long timescales needed to see certain impacts — for instance, environmental regeneration or viability of start-up businesses.

This has knock-on impacts for the ability of successful ideas to scale — since a given initiative’s value must be measurable before investments can be made in replicating or scaling it. These enduring challenges are compounded by current humanitarian funding and personnel contractions, which have significantly affected the technical expertise within UNHCR required to deliver essential environment and climate action work.

Some of these structural challenges will be partly addressed through UNHCR’s just-launched Innovation Accelerator — a global initiative designed to scale proven solutions. Already, the Accelerator is supporting a solarization project to explore locally tailored, sustainable energy solutions across multiple regions — an exciting opportunity to both reduce environmental degradation and promote self-reliance for the 91% of refugees living in camps who currently lack sustainable energy options.

Charting a new path forward

Even as the humanitarian sector reels from the repercussions of tightened purse-strings, climate action remains an increasingly essential part of UNHCR’s work. Submissions to the latest round of the UNHCR Innovation Incubator continued to put forward a wide range of ideas to tackle climate-related challenges, from using data analytics to better prepare for climate risks, to refugee-led flood risk management.

And the locally led climate action ongoing around the world gives room for hope. In Zimbabwe, the nature-based fencing project engaged 700 community members to help prevent erosion, store carbon, reduce deforestation, and strengthen food security and social cohesion. The fact that the solution was rooted in and run by the community was key to its success: activities continued even after the 2025 humanitarian funding freeze, because the community wanted them to; farmers were persuaded of the idea’s utility and worked to not only complete the planned fenceline, but also to extend it. As Gawaar says, “ensuring equitable access to climate finance for displaced populations is both a moral obligation and a strategic necessity.”

The full impact of this nature-based solution will take time to measure, but early benefits such as fewer animals entering cropland are already visible. The camp’s new refugee-run nursery, staffed by newly trained entrepreneurs, can grow 30,000 trees and seedlings annually — creating 800 square metres of potential for a more climate-resilient future.

Find out more about UNHCR’s Environment and Climate Action Innovation work here.

Refugees innovating for inclusive climate action was originally published in UNHCR Innovation on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

By Petar Dimitrov, Associate Innovation Officer, and Alight Rwanda

In Mahama, Rwanda’s largest refugee camp, a silent mental health crisis is brewing. Mahama, in the far east of the country, is home to nearly 70,000 people forced to flee violent conflict, primarily from Burundi and the Democratic Republic of Congo. More than half of those surveyed have lived in the camp for seven years or longer. Over time, the initial trauma of displacement is compounded by everyday struggles and uncertainty.

Finding work in the camp is extremely difficult. Unemployment affects roughly two in every three people, and the inability to support oneself or plan for the future creates chronic stress that steadily erodes mental wellbeing. Three in every four camp residents experience anxiety, depression, or trouble sleeping. Yet, only a small minority seek out formal help, due to social stigma. For most, the burden is carried alone.

One young man describes this sense of isolation and helplessness:

“I used to think mental illnesses do not get better. I thought they were something that cannot be treated. I felt alone, with no one to tell about my grief and the situation I was going through.”

Recognizing that there is no health without mental health, UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, in partnership with Alight, set out to test whether accessible, digital-enabled mental health and psychosocial services (MHPSS) could dismantle barriers to seeking help.

‘I’m here, talk to me’

In Mahama, as in many contexts, fear of judgement from the wider community keeps many from speaking openly about mental health challenges. Rather than seeking support, many who are suffering turn to alcohol or withdraw socially — coping mechanisms that can make things worse rather than better. Dr Christophe Rushanika, Alight’s technical advisor on health and nutrition, explains:

“We needed a way to reach people and let them know it’s OK not to be OK — and that help is available at the clinics. In humanitarian contexts, primary healthcare often takes priority, while mental health support is underfunded. We knew that mobile phone adoption was high in Mahama, thanks to its use for cash transfer programmes. That gave us an opportunity to connect with more people using fewer resources.”

Based on prevailing social norms and mobile phone saturation, UNHCR, Alight, Viamo, and the Rwanda Biomedical Centre designed and piloted an offline-available interactive voice response (IVR) system to raise awareness and provide preliminary care. Through basic spoken audio on a mobile phone, the tool provides mental health information, guided self-help exercises, and personalized pathways to care — without requiring an internet connection. To access the service, users simply dial 845 and follow the voice prompts.

This system uses the Wanji Games platform: a “choose-your-own-adventure” IVR journey, designed to provide education via toll-free calling, with players charting their own course through the learning materials using their keypad. The model is particularly useful in contexts like Mahama, where connectivity can’t be taken for granted. In Luganda — a Bantu language spoken primarily in Uganda — “wanji” means “I’m here, talk to me.” For UNHCR and Alight, the intention was to offer a platform that listens — and then guides.

Quietly reaching thousands

The mental health scenarios developed during this pilot, supported through UNHCR’s Digital Innovation Fund, provide a variety of potential journeys based on what the user wants to know. After dialling 845 and selecting a topic, the caller is guided through a series of educational voice messages. Say, for instance, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is selected: The subsequent messages explain the symptoms, clarify that the condition is a response to trauma rather than a sign of personal weakness, outline prevention and treatment options available at community clinics, provide guidance on how to assist someone experiencing a flashback or distress, and, finally, conclude with a quiz to consolidate learning. Other messages share personal testimonies, walking listeners through what it’s like to take the first step toward care: how to prepare, what to expect at the clinic, and how treatment and recovery could unfold over time.

Beyond the content itself, the simple fact of an always available tool ready to listen and coach callers through taboo topics provided a sense of accompaniment. One young man in Mahama explained:

“This tool helped me feel not alone. Like coming from darkness to the light. Because there is a voice on the other end to guide you. It gives comfort. And you understand that other people face these problems too.”

Between June and August 2025, the platform served 12,333 callers who listened to 74,844 key messages. It proved especially popular among young listeners: 55% were under 25 years old and the vast majority were under 35, with women consistently outnumbering men among users. The anonymity and flexibility the platform offered meant callers could learn about mental health from the comfort of their homes, on their own schedule, and without fear of judgment.

Learning together

At the conclusion of the pilot, mental health literacy had measurably improved across the community. According to surveys, more people were able to define ‘mental health’, recognize the symptoms of certain mental disorders, and understand that conditions such as epilepsy and depression are treatable. Belief in biomedical explanations for mental health disorders increased, while reliance on supernatural explanations declined. People reported feeling more comfortable discussing mental health and their own struggles.

Overall, stigma and discrimination around mental health decreased by 10%. Ndagijimana Beatrice, a woman in the camp, says:

“Understanding our own mental health helps us understand and support others. When we see someone struggling with mental health, we don’t judge them. We say: Go and see a doctor, they can help. Our lives are better when we don’t keep this for ourselves.”

Indeed, the project resulted in significantly more people seeking help. Clinics reported a 5% increase in individuals coming forward for psychosocial support. Community coping mechanisms also began to shift. Instead of withdrawing or turning to alcohol, people increasingly adopted healthier strategies for managing mental health challenges, such as attending individual counseling sessions, participating in MHPSS support groups, and reaching out to community health workers and peer supporters. Reflecting this wider shift, one young man says:

“Listening to the messages brought hope. It helped me understand that mental health illnesses are normal — and that there is a path forward to cure them. That tomorrow will be better. It encouraged me to seek help at the health centers and to trust health practitioners to help me.”

No panacea

In addition to promising results, this pilot delivered important lessons to incorporate into the design and delivery of digital MHPSS interventions. One is the importance of addressing economic opportunity alongside mental wellbeing. This is illustrated by the experience of Jacqueline, a 16-year-old who became pregnant after rape. Ostracized by her family, she attempted suicide. Through the project, Jacqueline accessed youth-focused group therapy sessions. This psychosocial support was accompanied by economic empowerment, through a savings group established by a different Alight initiative. The impact of this dual support was transformative. Jacqueline started a small business and became an advocate, encouraging her peers to seek mental health support.

However, awareness didn’t always lead to action. While stigma around mental health reportedly dropped by 10%, clinic visits rose by just 5%. This gap suggests that awareness alone is not enough. Future interventions must consider how to address other social, psychological, and structural barriers people face at the moment they consider seeking care. This means tailoring communication and services to different demographics and making it easier for people to move from intention to action through measures like clear referral pathways and community-based, decentralized care points.

Building trust with religious leaders and traditional healers was key to the pilot’s success. Many camp residents have historically turned to them, rather than to clinics, to address mental health issues. Through community outreach and dialogue, the pilot created lines of communication and established trust with these actors. Over time, they began referring people to clinics. Community health workers play a similarly essential role in linking people to care, but they require ongoing training and support to confidently handle complex mental health cases.

Finally, while digital tools are particularly effective for reaching young people, they must be combined with non-digital approaches to ensure those without phones or digital skills are not left behind.

Looking to scale

This pilot demonstrates that digital solutions can help guide people toward care and reduce stigma, but they cannot solve the root causes of distress or provide holistic care on their own. Poverty, limited opportunity, and prolonged uncertainty continue to weigh heavily on mental wellbeing. To achieve long-lasting impact, mental health interventions must go hand in hand with pathways for education, vocational training, and income generation.

Nevertheless, the IVR system’s impact on stigma, awareness, and service access was clear. And Mahama is not unique; similar challenges exist in other camps across Rwanda and beyond. Given the strong uptake and positive behavioral outcomes, there is a clear rationale to expand the platform to additional refugee camps in Rwanda and potentially to neighboring countries. The project team is actively seeking partnerships and funding opportunities to support this next phase, with the goal of scaling a cost-effective, accessible model for delivering MHPSS to populations with limited internet connectivity.

Learn more about the Digital Innovation Fund.

It’s OK to not be OK: Digital mental health in Mahama Refugee Camp was originally published in UNHCR Innovation on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

By Omar Ganchala, Communications Associate at UNHCR in Quito, Ecuador

When Jackson Bianco first walked into the Quito Food Bank, he never imagined that this place would not only help feed his family but also nourish his dreams of building a better future alongside them.

Jackson arrived in Ecuador from Venezuela in 2019. He left behind everything he had: his job as a journalist, his dreams, and part of his family. Back home, working as a journalist had become increasingly difficult — so difficult that he had no choice but to seek safety elsewhere.

When asked why he chose Ecuador, Jackson smiles, because he had little choice about where to go. His sister had been living in Manta for 35 years, and she welcomed him and his family when they arrived. But plans soon changed. Jackson and his family decided to move to Quito. Only a few years later, his wife died.

“I couldn’t work because I had to take care of my children, especially my youngest, who has a disability,” Jackson says. “I came [to Quito] to do an internship in Theology at the Church of Christ, and across the street was the Food Bank.” Jackson walked in one day and found not only support to feed his family, but also an opportunity that would change his life.

He, along with almost 40 others, took part in Ecoactivo, a project supported by the Environment and Climate Action Innovation Fund of UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, that tested a new model to better support circular businesses. The project has improved waste management — a challenge in many areas where refugees reside that impacts their environment, health, and opportunities — while also building self-reliance

From food aid to entrepreneurship

Led by UNHCR and the Quito Food Bank, in collaboration with Conquito, the Metropolitan Agency for Economic Promotion of Quito, and the National Polytechnic School, Ecoactivo was based on a simple idea: to link people who receive food kits from the Food Bank to skills-building and entrepreneurship opportunities that would help them thrive independently . Refugees would not only build better futures for themselves — but contribute to an inclusive green transition more broadly.

Students and professors from the National Polytechnic School provided theoretical and practical training to enable the 39 participants — both people forced to flee and vulnerable members of the host community — to design, develop and test their own sustainable products, using inputs sourced from the Food Bank. In addition, Conquito staff delivered workshops on soft skills and legal aspects of business formalization, as well as training on financial management, administration, and business promotion. Participants also learned how to pitch their products. As a result, 33 entrepreneurs received seed capital to strengthen their businesses, which are now sustainable and generating positive, meaningful impacts in their communities.

Turning pulp into a business proposition

One of the participants was Mary Moncada. She left Venezuela for Ecuador in 2022, due to shortages of basic goods, having previously tried to build a new life in Colombia. In Ecuador, she had several jobs: first peeling potatoes in a small business, then working at a Venezuelan restaurant, and eventually selling food with her sister on the streets of Quito’s downtown.

In Quito, she joined the Food Bank as a volunteer and, a few months later, became part of the Ecoactivo project. This is where her fruit pulp business, Fruti Life, was born. “As a volunteer, I realized that [discarded] food and fruit still had a lot of life — maybe 99% of their usefulness,” Mary said. “So, I thought they could be recovered and given a new purpose: making juices, ice cream, smoothies. That’s why I love the work of the Food Bank — because we recover food so that others can benefit from it”. Mary’s business took off. She began selling door to door and, thanks to word of mouth, her customer base has grown steadily. It now even includes restaurants.

Learning how to establish profit margins, through the tailored training provided during the project, has been key to her success. “I learned how to calculate costs,” Mary explains. “Now I know exactly how much fruit I need for each pulp, and I can determine its cost. For example, if I get 250gr pulp from four apples and can make three beverages from it, I know how much to charge for each pulp and each drink — without losing profit or competitiveness.”

Creating jobs while reducing waste

Mary and Jackson just two of the more than 440,000 refugees and migrants from Venezuela currently living in Ecuador. In 2021, according to UNHCR’s Protection Monitoring, only 10% of these people had access to adequate employment — in other words, were earning a wage equal to or above the minimum salary. Similarly, the 2024 Joint Needs Assessment conducted as part of the humanitarian response found that around 65% of surveyed refugees and migrants reported being in need of employment or income-generating opportunities.

“Refugees flee their countries carrying with them immense talent and skills that can contribute to the development of host economies,” says Federico Agusti, UNHCR Representative in Ecuador. “Partnerships like those created through the Ecoactivo project are vital to providing displaced people and Ecuadorians with opportunities to generate income, which translates into wellbeing for their families and development for their communities, while also contributing to food security and environmental protection.”

Through Ecoactivo, forcibly displaced people and host communities not only found a way to make ends meet. They also contributed greatly to promoting sustainable products while caring for the environment around them. In just the initial trial stages of developing their businesses, 352 kg of recovered food and reused clothing were used as production inputs, demonstrating the project’s core environmental impact and its contribution to waste reduction. As these circular businesses grow, so will their contribution to reducing emissions and the environmental and health hazards created by waste.

Living in the present

The lessons and experiences of this project have not only helped refugees, but UNHCR as well. The testing and results of the different skills building and support activities helped create a curriculum for more targeted entrepreneurship support. The partnerships with local organizations identified ways to build on these and expand reach. The Food Bank and UNHCR will continue their collaboration, working with vulnerable refugees and migrants to support them to develop their own green businesses.

For Jackson, entrepreneurship became the opportunity to generate income for his family without neglecting the care of his children. “Ecoactivo was an opportunity to support myself financially while having a job that allows me to manage my time,” he says. “Not all businesses achieve the success we hope for, but we must do things right to reach economic and emotional wellbeing, especially when we have families with young children.”

Thanks to their participation in Ecoactivo, Jackson has been able to strengthen his traditional Venezuelan food business and Mary could access seed capital that enabled her to expand her fruit pulp business while preparing a physical location to serve her clients.

They each dream of expanding their business to other parts of the city, the country, and — why not, they say — even back to Venezuela and beyond. “The important thing is to keep moving forward, no matter what,” Mary says. “There’s a saying that goes: You learn from the past, but you don’t live in it. You must live in the present and move forward. The past teaches us to keep going. We must fight — we can do it.”

Find out more about the Environment and Climate Action Innovation Fund here.

Refugee entrepreneurs transforming waste into self-reliance was originally published in UNHCR Innovation on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

By Carol Mungo (Associate Energy and Environment Expert), Jupsergi Dimi (Associate Energy and Environment Officer), Omar Doukali (Associate Communications Officer), and Arby Kane (independent consultant)

Every morning, before the heat settles over Mbera Refugee Camp in eastern Mauritania, Hanou prepares tea and breakfast for her children and grandson. For years, this daily routine meant cooking over charcoal, filling her shelter with thick smoke that burned her eyes, irritated her lungs, and lingered long after the meal was finished.

“The smoke was everywhere,” she remembers. “It didn’t just come from our own cooking, but from our neighbors too. It made it hard to breathe and sometimes caused tension between us.”

Today, Hanou cooks differently. A mother, grandmother, and community leader, she is among the women in Mbera gradually shifting away from charcoal and firewood toward cleaner cooking solutions. The change did not happen overnight. Instead, it continues to happen little by little, through small, manageable payments, learning, and support.

In Mbera, this “little by little” shift is made possible through a small-scale loan tied specifically for use on cleaner fuels — an approach that links clean cooking with climate and environmental benefits, while making access affordable for families. Rather than asking households to make large upfront payments that few can afford, this energy transition–focused loan helps spread the cost of liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) over time, aligning payment structures with the way families already purchase fuel. The result is a transition that feels familiar, flexible, and achievable, rather than risky or out of reach.

A woman at the heart of community action

Hanou is a leader of VRPC (Volontaires Réfugiés pour la Propreté du Camp), one of the first refugee-led organizations in Mbera — a camp hosting approximately 120,000 Malian refugees. Every day, members of VRPC work to keep the camp clean while also engaging in agriculture and environmental protection activities. Their work supports both refugee and host communities, helping reduce environmental pressure and improve living conditions.

Living and working in the Fassala Commune, a dry and environmentally fragile area, Hanou has seen how heavy reliance on firewood and charcoal affects health, livelihoods, and the land itself. Trees disappear quickly, and smoke from indoor cooking takes a toll on women and children who spend long hours near cooking fires.

“For us, clean cooking is not just about comfort,” Hanou explains. “It’s about health, dignity, and protecting the environment for our children and grandchildren.”

Learning to cook — and pay — differently

With support from the Environment and Climate Action Innovation Fund, the UNHCR Mauritania operation worked with refuges, host communities, and local businesses to find ways in which LPG could be paid for in small amounts, instead of the only existing option of buying a full and costly cannister. After encountering challenges with partnership options, UNHCR partnered with the microfinance institution Djikké to co-design, alongside refugees, a loan product that was clear, accessible and adapted to their needs — given that they are often excluded from formal financial services.

After the design of this approach, extensive training sessions were organized for more than one thousand people from both refugee and host communities. These trainings took place wherever people gathered, inside community rooms, under trees, and in open spaces both inside and outside the camp. Participants learned how to use LPG safely, how the payment system works, and how to manage cooking gas alongside their household budgets.

“I was happy to know I was selected for the LPG project,” Hanou says. “But at first, I had many questions. I didn’t know exactly how to use the gas or how the payment system with Djikké worked.”

Over time, those questions turned into confidence.

Making gas affordable, one refill at a time

What made the difference for Hanou was affordability. Instead of paying a large amount upfront, she could go directly to Djikké, which covered around 50 percent of the cost of refilling the gas cylinder.

“With the money I used to spend on charcoal, I can now pay for the gas,” she explains. “Little by little, it becomes possible.”

Using LPG also changed how Hanou organizes her day. Cooking takes less time, allowing her to spend more hours in the vegetable garden and on VRPC’s activities.

“When I wake up in the morning, I prepare tea and breakfast with the gas,” she says. “Then I go to the garden. Preparing lunch later doesn’t take long anymore.”

Time once lost to fuel preparation and long cooking hours is now reclaimed for productive and community-focused work and — importantly — for rest. In this already very arid environment facing many days of extreme heat, reducing a driver of deforestation will also have wider environmental benefits for the whole community — from increased shade cover to more substantial barriers against dust storms and improved water retention.

Building confidence and safety together

Like many families, Hanou initially worried about safety, especially cooking with gas in a shelter shared with children. Some households were unsure where to place cylinders or how to store them properly, and misinformation sometimes led to unsafe practices.

“These fears come from not knowing enough,” Hanou explains, speaking about the practice of burying LPG cylinders, which some communities believed to be the best storage method. “People want to protect their children, but they need clear information.”

Continuous training, demonstrations, and peer learning have been essential. As a community leader, Hanou now helps others understand safe practices, encouraging neighbors to ask questions and learn together, rather than rely on rumors.

An evolving programme with lessons learned

Hanou’s experience reflects a broader shift that has been unfolding in Mauritania for several years. Since 2022, UNHCR Mauritania has been piloting the Cash for Gas programme, which has so far supported more than 4,000 households to access cleaner cooking solutions. A major challenge for longer term transition to cleaner cooking, however, is that after the initial cash assistance, most households go back to using coal as they cannot afford a new cannister. Experimenting with options was essential to find out how to make this an affordable practice for refugees.

In 2023, support from the Environment and Climate Action Innovation Fund created an opportunity to test partial refilling of gas cylinders — an idea inspired by the way households traditionally purchase charcoal, in small, affordable amounts. It became clear partial refilling of cannisters and only paying for the refilled amount would not work, as this created many regulatory problems. The project had to evolve, adapting to the local context and specific challenges of Mbera. As a result, focus shifted to strengthening collaboration with Djikké to support households both to access an initial LPG kit and to continue refilling their cylinders over time.

This evolution was not only crucial for finding a workable solution, but also became the backbone of how the practice could scale organically. Not only do refugees now learn about how this works from their peers, but also an institution present locally has a readily available product for them to use directly — reducing reliance on humanitarian assistance. This has opened a market space for financial services that is bringing opportunities to refugees and host communities alike.

For Hanou, the flexibility of the system is what makes the difference.

“If we can pay little by little, like we used to do with charcoal, then gas becomes possible,” she says. “That’s how change really happens.”

Breathing easier, looking ahead

The most immediate change in Hanou’s home is simple but powerful: cleaner air.

“Before, the smoke filled our space,” she says. “Now the air is clearer, cooking is faster, and life feels easier.”

Her story shows that clean cooking transitions are not about sudden transformation. They are about bridging the gap — step by step — between daily realities and longer-term solutions.

A January 2026 MOU between UNHCR and Banque Centrale de Mauritanie now offers promising prospects for expanding inclusive financial access moving forward, making this pay-as-you-go approach sustainable in the long term.

As Hanou continues her work with VRPC, tending the garden and keeping the camp clean, she sees LPG not as an end point, but as part of a wider effort to build healthier, more sustainable communities.

“Little by little,” she says, “we are changing how we live.”

Find out more about the Environment and Climate Action Innovation Fund.

Little by little: How accessible loans are opening the door to clean cooking in Mauritania was originally published in UNHCR Innovation on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

By Solji Oh (Associate Innovation Officer) and Panita Ploi Plangprayoon (Assistant Innovation Officer)

In a secluded stretch of Bidibidi, Uganda — one of the world’s largest refugee settlements — a young man stood still, eyes wide behind a bulky virtual reality (VR) headset. Around him, nothing seems to have changed. But inside the headset, he was somewhere else entirely: floating in a virtual studio, painting alongside refugee artists from Afghan, Pakistani, and Burmese communities in Indonesia. They were sketching dreams and futures together, brushstroke by brushstroke, across borders.

This is the heart of the Digital Art for Youth and Community Wellbeing Project, a multi-country initiative that uses digital art and immersive technology to foster youth and community wellbeing in displacement contexts — testing new methodologies to effectively deliver mental health and psychological support (MHPSS). Through VR headsets and collaborative virtual spaces, forcibly displaced young people are not just connecting — they’re co-creating artistic projects and expressing themselves along the way.

“When I put on the VR headset, it felt like I was free. It’s something I’ll never forget, and it helped me see the world in a whole new way.” — Male South Sudanese refugee, Bidibidi Refugee Settlement, Uganda

Through the project, made possible by the Digital Innovation Fund, UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, worked alongside local partners and Artolution, an international community-based public arts organization, to identify, train, and support artists from refugee and forcibly displaced communities across four countries.

Art as healing, connection as power

For refugees, displacement is not only a physical journey but an emotional rupture. The loss of home, community, and identity can leave deep scars, often compounded by experiences of conflict or persecution that contribute to anxiety and depression. Limited access to education, healthcare, and support networks — along with language and cultural barriers — can further intensify feelings of isolation and loneliness.

Art, while no panacea, has long been a balm for trauma; today, digital art offers a new canvas for healing. By creating new worlds, it plants the seeds of confidence, hope, and resilience. It reminds young refugees that throughout their journeys, they have repeatedly shown extraordinary strength in overcoming adversity.

The Digital Art for Youth and Community Wellbeing Project was designed and implemented with the expert guidance of a UNHCR psychologist with more than 15 years of experience in providing psychological support in humanitarian settings. The project began with digital art training — illustration, graphic design, and visual storytelling — for young refugees from diverse backgrounds: Sahrawi, Sudanese and Malian communities in Algeria; Ukrainians rebuilding their lives in Czechia; Afghan, Pakistani, and Burmese living in Indonesia; and South Sudanese artists in Uganda.

Each participant brings their own stories, symbols, and dreams to the canvas, turning digital skills into powerful tools for expression and connection. The goal isn’t just to teach digital art; it’s to help young refugees rebuild confidence, form meaningful peer relationships, and discover skills that could one day open doors to income and opportunity.

“My whole life feels like I’m always running. This was the only time I could escape all of that and truly enjoy myself.” — Male Malian refugee, Algiers, Algeria

Having completed the digital art training, participants took the skills they had learned offline, designing and painting community murals that transformed blank walls into vibrant declarations of resilience. These murals were co-created with the wider community, ensuring local neighbors paint alongside refugee artists. The public artworks in Prague’s Holešovice district, for instance, spark visibility, belonging, and a sense of unity that lingers long after the paint dries.

Alongside these analogue activities, the project generated a virtual studio with Meta Quest VR headsets using MultiBrush, a collaborative VR tool for painting. In this virtual creative space, the young participants drew, painted, and sculpted together in real time, sharing stories without words and building friendships unconstrained by geography.

In one VR workshop, participants worked collaboratively to draw a lush landscape — filling this garden with the animals and flowers of their home countries. This artwork enabled them to share their cultures and spark hope.

“We came from South Sudan when we were in war. So, by that time, we had a lot of trauma and we lost hope in life. But using virtual reality makes us feel mentally positive, as it allows us to immerse ourselves in a world where we can change the community we lived in into a positive living.” — Female South Sudanese refugee, Bidibidi Refugee Settlement, Uganda

Building bridges through art

By connecting refugee communities across three continents, this project is challenging isolation and fostering solidarity. Following the conclusion of activities, 78% of participants in Indonesia, for instance, reported feeling less alone, more hopeful, more confident, and more empowered to express themselves — strongly suggesting that the project boosted emotional wellbeing and reduced distress. Participants demonstrate an overall improvement in psychological outcomes and experience a more positive outlook on their lives and relationships as a result of their involvement.

As youth co-create across borders, they begin to see displacement not just as loss, but as a shared experience. Many speak of how the project reshaped their understanding of what it means to be a refugee.

Explaining a digital painting he made during the project, a male refugee participant in Indonesia said:

“This is the story of the candle in darkness. I am the candle in the painting. Even with heavy rain and wind in the dark, the candle still manages to light up despite the circumstance.”

The project’s workshops were carefully facilitated by local artists, the team from Artolution, and mental health professionals — designed to be both creatively rich and emotionally safe, informed by psychosocial principles. Artolution provided MHPSS workshop training for local trainers delivering project activities to ensure they created a supportive and encouraging environment for participants. The creative process itself also served as a therapeutic outlet for many participants to turn their negative emotions into something meaningful and foster a sense of resilience.

Facilitators have witnessed profound transformations in participants’ behaviors throughout the project. Those that began with quiet hesitation evolved into becoming the most vibrant group leaders, and strong peer support networks were formed.

The artworks that emerged out of this project, especially the community murals, are also a powerful tool. They serve as public declarations of unity. In several countries, the murals have been broadcast on national television, sparking conversations about peaceful coexistence and shared humanity between refugees and host communities.

At its core, this initiative is a reminder that innovation must serve people. Improved well-being is essential to enable refugees to reach their full potential and contribute to their new communities. The innovative use of digital technologies for art therapy enabled this project to create safe spaces for refugees to foster connections and access MHPSS without fear of stigma. For project participants, the VR headset was more than just a gadget — it was a window into a different, shared future.

Innovation rooted in humanity

“This project reminds us that art is not a luxury,” says Sofia Casas, Mental Health and Psychosocial Support Officer at UNHCR. “For displaced youth, it can be a powerful tool for healing, hope, and connection, and a way to reimagine futures, together.”

By expanding access to digital tools and immersive technologies, the initiative affirms that displaced youth deserve the same freedom to express themselves, connect across borders, and shape their own stories as any other young people.

In these moments of creation and exchange, they find room to dream, to lead, and to reconnect, with themselves and with others.

Read more about the Digital Innovation Programme.

Painting freedom across borders: How digital art is transforming refugee wellbeing was originally published in UNHCR Innovation on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In 2025, reeling from funding cuts, innovators across the United Nations system sought strength in community. “There is this the sense across the board that anything we can do to work together to decrease duplications, grow impact, and support each other emotionally in this crisis is something worth putting our time and energy into,” says Zsuzsa Nagy-Sandor, Innovation Officer at UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency.

To flourish, innovators need safe spaces to experiment with new ideas as well as collaborators to bounce ideas off. A robust community, built around a shared interest in and vision of innovation, can supply both. With budgets tightening and humanitarians experiencing increased pressure amid complex, protracted displacement crises, such support is essential to ensure new ideas get the oxygen they need to grow.

Zsuzsa is familiar with the central role community can play in successful innovation — and with the challenges of building such communities, particularly online. As 2026 gets underway, she and colleagues in UNHCR’s Innovation Learning team are reflecting on what they’ve learned.

Connection and continuous learning

Since 2013, the Innovation Fellowship, UNHCR Innovation’s oldest initiative, has upskilled more than 300 people. In 2020, Zsuzsa joined the team with a simple question: How could Fellowship alumni keep learning and innovating once the training ended? Conversations across roles, regions, and organizations revealed a clear need for connection — insight that led to the creation of the Innovation Alumni Network (IAN), a global community of UNHCR staff and partners working in diverse contexts.

At its core, IAN aims to create a space for connection, collaboration, and continuous learning. Since its launch in 2021, Zsuzsa — now alongside Senior Learning Assistant Aziret Zhakypbaev and alumni co-leads — has focused on keeping the community lively and self-sustaining.

Why innovation needs community

The exploratory and iterative nature of innovation makes community essential. “Innovation is a continuous practice,” Zsuzsa says. “Innovators are happy to encounter others in similar shoes — people they can bounce ideas off, who can empathise or suggest solutions.” Challenging the status quo is a long, uphill process, and having peers who believe in the work can make the difference between simply having an idea and having the confidence to test, adapt, and try again.

That experimentation involves risk. As Azi — who now leads the community-building work — notes, IAN offers a safe, supportive space where “failing and learning from failure and getting peer support from others” is part of the process.

For many members, innovation is not a formal job function but rather a mindset they bring to their work. IAN helps keep this mindset alive by fostering connection, shared learning, and exposure to diverse perspectives across countries and disciplines. This diversity is a central feature, enabling innovators to test, cross-pollinate, and refine ideas in conversation with members based across more than 50 countries and working in 16 organizations.

Trial and error

The benefits of community are legion, but — as Zsuzsa is quick to note — “Community is not a solution for everything. It’s not something you create and then it works and then you’re good to go. It needs continuous care — and it needs to be based around real needs and real preferences and real people.”

IAN is a work in progress, a dynamic online space where Azi and Zsuzsa are always testing new ways of community building. When the network first launched, it took a dual approach, offering experience sharing and learning sessions as well as informal networking. “There was a lot of trial and error around, for instance, how can I spark people to have conversations?” Zsuzsa recalls. “And assessing: What communication channels do we have? Are they used? Are they useful?” These remain core questions.

The community operates fully online, requiring constant experimentation with digital tools (Teams, Linkedin, Viva Engage), while working to manage the technological overload its members could be experiencing. Azi and Zsuzsa may be the architects, but a community functions best when its members are engaged, empowered, and able to proactively reach out to each other for mutual aid. To support this, the team has tried various ways to catalogue and broadcast the various skillsets of its membership — something that has proven challenging in a fast-paced humanitarian environment.

In recent years, Azi says, the focus has been on “how to make the community more self-sustaining and self-reliant and autonomous.” One key move in that direction has been the co-leadership initiative — empowering a new pair of IAN members every six months to co-create events and nurture community engagement.

A group effort

For Giovani Castellani Zanini and Roos Middelkoop, serving as an IAN co-lead has been a way to give back to the Learning team — and to deepen their engagement with innovation.

When Roos applied to the Fellowship, in 2022, she was doing partnerships work with UNFPA in Bangladesh. The training made an impression on her because it was hands-on and expansive on a personal and professional level. Upon completion, she found IAN to be almost a “prolongation of the Fellowship … because you can still feel, especially in the gatherings, the same energy, the same curiosity from people.” Becoming an IAN co-lead was, she felt, a natural continuation of the way that Fellows are encouraged to be active participants and leaders of their learning journey.

For Giovani, the Fellowship provided exciting encounters with UNHCR colleagues in Country Operations related to his work — the procurement of IT supplies in emergencies. “We didn’t speak only about logistics, we spoke about everything,” he recalls. “I was able to understand how they work and what’s painful for them — and try to help with my work as well.” His curiosity and creativity led him to start supporting Azi on some of the community work, and then to apply to be a co-lead.

In conversation with Azi and the other community members, co-leads build on the work of their predecessors while also inhabiting the position in ways unique to them. One key function they perform is simply acting as another pair of eyes and ears, facilitating conversations with IAN members and ensuring the community is a two-way street, shaped by all its members. “I think [co-leadership] is really about listening a lot and showing up,” Roos says. “When you talk about community, it’s about: What kind of space do you offer to people? And what kind of worlds are you building together?”

Getting on with the work

UNHCR, like other actors in the humanitarian and development sectors, has been hit hard by funding constraints. Over the course of 2025, IAN’s membership dropped from 220 to 185, due to staffing cuts across UNHCR. (While departing colleagues are welcome to stay in the network, some do not, for various reasons.) Nevertheless, attendance at live events has remained consistently strong. “That’s where we see the biggest interest and get the most positive feedback,” Azi says.

In 2025, topics covered during these events included, among others, how refugee-led storytelling can counter misinformation and build empathy, how philosophy and ethics can shape innovation for good, and the growing threat of digital risks to forcibly displaced communities. Tracking attendance at these events has enabled the team to identify a core group of keen innovators, as well as those who might benefit from more direct engagement. Such metrics also assist in the monitoring and evaluation of the community, which can otherwise prove challenging.

Aware of the strain members are under, the team has settled into a regular rhythm of quarterly email newsletters, monthly events, and biweekly online engagement opportunities. “One of the main objectives of this strategy is to reduce community fatigue by making sure that people are not overwhelmed with information,” Azi says.

For the Innovation Learning team, this work is both hard and essential. “Something I think is important to note is that building communities is care work,” Zsuzsa says:

“It takes a lot of a person. It’s not just something you do administratively. It’s something you really pour yourself into and it can be challenging. It can be hard to keep posting into an empty Teams space or keep sending emails you never get answers to. It can feel like you’re shouting into a void. But when you do get that feedback, when you do talk to the people, and you get affirmation that this is important and meaningful to them — that it’s keeping their commitment to innovation alive — that means a lot.”

Learn more about IAN and the Innovation Fellowship.

‘Building communities is care work’: Innovating alongside others was originally published in UNHCR Innovation on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Since the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, in 2022, more than 5.7 million Ukrainians have fled the country, around 600,000 of them finding themselves in Slovenia, Czechia, Slovakia, and Hungary. In their scramble to set up new lives in safety, the displaced turned to trusted sources of information: each other. “Informal communication within our community can be challenging,” a Ukrainian refugee in Prague told UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, “but it’s often the most helpful way to get information.”

Much of this information exchange took place in digital spaces, with online activity — particularly on Telegram and Facebook — ballooning during initial waves of displacement. “The people fleeing Ukraine were probably on average much more digitally literate compared to other responses that UNHCR has been working on — meaning that they’ve been using digital tools and platforms at a much higher rate, and accessing services and information in a slightly different way to what we’re used to,” explains Márton Elődi, former Digital Expert with UNHCR Hungary. “This creates both new challenges and also possibilities for UNHCR.”

These online interactions generated a flood of unstructured data about the communities UNHCR works with and for — a potentially valuable resource to inform more targeted and timely interventions, if it could be responsibly and efficiently analyzed. Rapid advancements in generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), specifically large language models (LLMs), made such analysis possible. So, Márton and Protection Officer Antonia Haegner set about leveraging this technology to better understand community concerns — prototyping a custom-built solution tailored to the needs of refugees and aligned with UNHCR’s data protection and operational standards.

A lifeline and a risk

When the war began, displaced people quickly turned to digital communities for support. These platforms offered fast, localized information but also introduced risks like misinformation and oversharing of sensitive data. While helpful, the surge in online engagement created new protection challenges.

“We had to acknowledge that we are kind of unable to directly respond to these risks from a technical perspective,” Márton recalls. UNHCR couldn’t comprehensively monitor these communities and remove problematic posts directly, so the Hungary Operation instead embarked on a project — supported through the Digital Innovation Fund — to raise awareness about online safety and digital protection. Called Wise Browsing, Safe Posting, that project developed and disseminated educational materials via YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, and Telegram. The campaign eventually reached more than 5 million people across Slovenia, Czechia, Slovakia and Hungary.

This work, focusing more on traditional community-based protection techniques, also sparked a new idea. “We realized that the type of questions community members are asking and the information they’re sharing could also help to guide our response strategies,” Márton says. By monitoring this activity, “we can better understand their perspectives and coordinate responses accordingly.”

A flood of information

UNHCR was already keeping an eye on online interactions, but there was no out-of-the-box solution to enable comprehensive monitoring. As a result, efforts were manual, ad hoc, and resource intensive. The sheer volume of online engagement posed a critical challenge. In the early days of the response, UNHCR Hungary was seeing more than 500 relevant posts/messages on Facebook daily, and thousands of Telegram messages weekly. As Antonia notes, “Community based protection is the bread and butter of UNHCR, but the data points are soon overwhelming.”

Manual monitoring made it impossible to achieve a full picture, and it meant certain protection issues could be missed. For instance, UNHCR made an effort to map all young Ukrainian sports teams arriving in Hungary, because often the players, who were minors, were traveling without their usual caregivers. One team only came to their attention in 2022, even though the coach had posted a relevant message to a public Telegram channel in 2022. “Potentially we could have identified their presence two years earlier,” Márton notes, “meaning more assistance and more support for these 20 to 30 children.”

A thorough review indicated that existing commercial and open-source monitoring tools focused on keyword tracking and brand monitoring, rather than on generating the type of nuanced, community-based insights needed for protection work. GenAI made such insights possible, but it also raised data privacy and ethics concerns. Before doing anything else, Márton and Antonia, with support from colleagues, worked hard to understand these concerns and the perspectives of the communities they hoped to support.

Gathering community insights

UNHCR Protection teams under the Representation for Central Europe consulted with more than 100 refugees across four countries through twelve focus group discussions, which aimed to understand community perspectives on media monitoring and information provision. In addition, they gathered insights from expert organizations, partners, and national media authorities. “Obviously, the most important part was the community engagement and to get the support and approval of the refugees themselves by first giving them a full picture of how this would work, how we would use their data, what kind of channels we would be monitoring, and how they could provide feedback to us,” Márton says.

Interestingly, most of the feedback suggested that Ukrainians were aware the information they were sharing was public, and they were already expecting humanitarian organizations to be collecting and using it. Ideally, however, they indicated that they would like to see evidence of how the information and feedback gathered from them was used to inform programming. “If monitoring our online communities helps provide timely assistance, especially in urgent situations involving minors or people with disabilities, I think it’s beneficial,” said one participant in a discussion in Czechia’s Hradec Kralove.

At the same time, the team conducted separate research to understand and define responsible AI in this context, in order to be able to design a solution grounded in human rights, personal data protection and privacy, and humanitarian ethics. To ensure long-term impact and cross-team learning, they initiated the development of standard operating procedures for ethical online monitoring, aligned with UNHCR’s framework on Accountability to Affected People (AAP).

Mapping community concerns

It took Márton, Antonia, and a network of technical colleagues more than a year to complete the project’s preparatory phases, including community consultations, compliance processes, human rights due diligence, and privacy safeguards (including a comprehensive data protection impact assessment). Then, they set about engineering prompts and testing the utility of available OpenAI models — privately deployed and running on UNHCR’s Microsoft Azure cloud to ensure complete data protection — to analyze the information being generated by online conversations. “The project kind of turned into this data-driven intelligence platform,” Márton says, “exploring how we can use data from different sources in different formats so that they all inform the same protection work.”

This process — designed to render information from these divergent data sources in a uniform format, to make it easily searchable and comparable — was guided by three core principles:

• Stay in control.
• Everything must be verifiable.
• Evidence-based process must be traceable from start to finish.

To address the second point, the team built a user interface that would enable feedback on the results to be given line-by-line, with specific information either accepted or rejected, to ensure accuracy. The result is a system that maintains responsible AI principles with mandatory human oversight and full output traceability.

The testing was startlingly successful from the beginning. With careful prompt engineering, very little fine tuning was required. “The fact that our initial prompts were producing reliable and useful results was something that was pretty impressive for me,” Márton recalls, “but also at first surprising, because I wasn’t expecting to make it work so easily.” The team was able to review and instantly classify information, using a labelling system that enabled them to, among other things, disaggregate information according to age, gender, and diversity (AGD) characteristics.

Among its key features, the tool maps community concerns by identifying locations mentioned across online platforms and displaying them on a heat map. Users can filter by date to track trends over time, helping teams quickly assess protection challenges in specific areas before missions or interventions.

Accounting for imperfect tools

A key risk of LLMs is that they are nondeterministic, meaning, as Márton puts it, “that for the same input they might be generating a different output”. AI-based algorithms and analysis are much easier to break than traditional statistical methods. Moreover, we don’t fully understand how these models work; their internal logic is somewhat opaque. Importantly, too, LLM’s are better at extracting data from certain document formats and certain languages than others — which could pose more of a challenge when seeking to develop a standardized, widely used tool. Nevertheless, the project’s rigorous research and three core principles helped to mitigate these issues — with verification, triangulation, and follow-up action — and ensure accurate, verifiable results.

While the project did not set out to train a bespoke GenAI tool on specific datasets, Márton acknowledges that this would have manifold benefits. “UNHCR could play a very crucial role in making AI more inclusive and more specialized and more safe, of course,” he says.

Identifying potentially life-saving opportunities

As resources shrink, being able to efficiently understand refugee concerns and respond to them becomes ever more essential. While many are concerned about the rapid advancements in AI, it undoubtedly creates new ways for humanitarians to enhance effectiveness and close the feedback loop with communities — if deployed creatively and responsibly. This project carefully addressed potential pitfalls and uncovered key opportunities this technology presents for UNHCR’s protection work, developing a scalable, technical solution that could be deployed across different contexts.

The team’s highly effective, fully documented prototype software — grounded in community preferences and aligned to humanitarian principles — is now available to be tested by different UNHCR Operations for different use cases. Its rapid, comprehensive analysis of community-produced data from different sources has high potential — particularly in new displacement situations when a high volume of data is generated.

As Márton notes, “In emergencies, this tool helps preserve and interpret fast-moving information.”

Find out more about UNHCR’s Digital Innovation work.

Leveraging AI for community-based protection was originally published in UNHCR Innovation on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Three years ago, UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, launched the Refugee-led Innovation Fund. This new support mechanism was based on a few simple ideas: Displaced and stateless people know their own needs and aspirations best; they’re organizing to make lasting positive change; but they struggle to access traditional funding sources. The Refugee-led Innovation Fund sought to change that and to empower organizations led by displaced and stateless people by providing them with holistic support to design and implement innovative initiatives in their communities.

Now, as humanitarian funding dwindles and needs ratchet up, these organizations and their new ideas tailored to local needs are more essential than ever. UNHCR Innovation has just endorsed 10 new projects for support through the Fund (with several more still under consideration) — joining the 40 projects across almost 30 countries that have already received support.

So far, the projects championed through the Fund have positively affected the lives of more than 160,000 people from both displaced and host communities. Starting in 2025 and rolling through 2026, our newly supported projects will be finding new ways to enhance education, economic opportunities, environmental health, advocacy, and access to services for people forced to flee.

Here’s a quick rundown of the newly supported projects and the brilliant organizations behind them 👇

Widening education access for enhanced opportunity

Education can be a vital stepping stone to greater opportunities and socioeconomic inclusion for refugees and other forcibly displaced and stateless people. In Ireland, the Samali Foundation is focused on dismantling barriers to education. With support from the Fund, this organization will be piloting a one-year postgraduate access programme designed specifically for refugees and asylum seekers. The first of its kind in the country, the programme will combine tailored academic preparation, mentorship, and civic engagement and — critically — it will recognize prior learning without requiring formal documentation. Through this flexible admissions pathway, up to 10 people will gain access to higher education and, pending the pilot’s successful completion, a new model for education access will be established.

In Hungary, the OLIve Education Association also champions equality in education access, through various initiatives. Now, with support from UNHCR, they’ll be driving forward greater refugee leadership in the education sector, with a programme designed to enable experienced educators and refugee teachers to share knowledge and upskill less experienced teachers and education managers — creating a connected, empowered network of refugee educators and amplifying their voices in civil society.

Upskilling for women’s economic empowerment

Beyond academic qualifications, vocational skill building is a critical way for refugees to gain self-reliance and to contribute to their new communities. In Kenya, the Solidarity Initiative for Refugees (SIR) — a graduate of our Digital Gender Inclusion and Innovation Bootcamp — is dedicated to building pathways toward dignified livelihoods for forcibly displaced people. As part of this mission, SIR will be empowering single mothers in Kakuma Refugee Camp to become fashion entrepreneurs, with training in garment-making, digital literacy, and business development. Paired with mentorship, e-commerce market access, and childcare support, this training will strengthen the earning potential of 60 women, with ripple effects for 500+ community members.

Many women returnees to Kunduz Province, Afghanistan, face economic hardship and struggle to reintegrate. The Organization for Women’s Empowerment aims to address these challenges by providing 30 women entrepreneurs with business planning, financial literacy, and marketing training to enable them to restart small businesses in the community they’ve returned to. By incorporating psychological support and awareness-raising, the project will additionally ease barriers to reintegration and business growth — which, in turn, will boost the economic activity of the area.

Boosting environmental and human health

Healthy communities rely on health environments. In Uganda, Bidibidi Refugee Camp struggles with plastic waste management. So, Generous Designs Africa plans to establish a recycling centre in the camp to transform this waste into useful and durable household items — both cleaning up the camp environment and creating green jobs for camp inhabitants. They’ll also be raising awareness about environmental protection and eco-friendly waste-management practices, reaching more than 300 people.

A more immediately hazardous environmental challenge faces those living in Kavumu refugee camp, Burundi: deep ravines, formed due to heavy rainfall and unchecked soil erosion. Agir pour l’environnement aims to implement a nature-based, community-led strategy to address this erosion — including planting soil-stabilizing species and constructing rainwater channels — protecting homes, agricultural fields, and water sources, and enhancing quality of life for all residents. More than 2,700 refugees and host community members will enjoy safer common areas — and enhanced environmental resilience will protect against further climate change–fueled displacement.

Amplifying essential voices for more effective advocacy and inclusion

People with lived experience of forced displacement and statelessness are the most persuasive and powerful advocates for these causes, yet they too often struggle to meaningfully participate in decision-making. Ensuring their voices can be heard is critical to raising awareness of the challenges they face and gaining support for greater inclusion and empowerment.

The Canadian Centre on Statelessness will be pioneering the Statelessness Knowledge Platform — an online hub, cocreated with community members, to provide information on statelessness in Canada and connections to legal professionals, as well as fostering collaboration to improve stateless people’s access to justice. Meanwhile, in Nigeria, the Women’s Interfaith Network will be working to care for and advocate on behalf of women who have experienced conflict-related sexual violence — addressing the stigma survivors face through psychological support and community dialogue. This project will engage survivors, traditional and religious leaders, and other community members, and will provide mental health and psychological support to more than 900 people.

Breaking down barriers to essential services

Water is essential to life — yet securing and storing safe drinking water can be a challenge in contexts of forced displacement. In Ethiopia’s Jewi refugee camp, Youth Life Change for Peace and Development is looking to local traditional techniques and materials to address water contamination and associated health risks. They’ll be developing and distributing clay water storage vessels designed to enable hygienic hydration — reducing the risk of water-borne diseases for 24,000 people.

In Brussels, Belgium, essential services like healthcare and housing are available — but refugees and asylum seekers can struggle to access them due to systemic gaps or language/cultural barriers. The Umbrella Refugee Committee aims to address this challenge by training and deploying refugee-led mobile teams to provide tailored assistance to communities left behind by the formal reception system. Diverse and able to navigate complex systems, these teams will ensure 1,500 individuals can access essential services — and the data they collect will inform policymaking and advocacy to drive wider systemic change.

*

Embedded in and trusted by their communities, organizations led by displaced and stateless people are expertly equipped to address urgent challenges. As humanitarian funding dwindles, supporting their innovative solutions is an essential means of delivering a brighter future for people forced to flee and their hosts. We’re honoured to be able to do so — and can’t wait to watch their pilots unfold, delivering learnings for the sector at large and lasting positive change for their communities.

Read more about the Refugee-led Innovation Fund. Follow the progress of these projects on our LinkedIn page. More projects to be announced soon — stay tuned!

The Refugee-led Innovation Fund welcomes a new cohort of changemakers was originally published in UNHCR Innovation on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

By Panita (Ploi) Plangprayoon, Assistant Innovation Officer

“I feel truly fortunate to be part of this training — it opened my eyes to how compassion, empathy, and dedication can change lives.”

For this refugee participant in a caregiving course, the training lit a path toward making a powerful contribution to their community. As well as forging a sense of purpose and strengthening societal fabric, livelihoods can also — for people forced to flee — be a critical means of mobility and self-reliance.

With protracted displacement on the rise, humanitarian resources stretched, and limited options for resettlement, finding durable and lasting solutions for refugees is an increasingly urgent dilemma. Many host countries, however, bar refugees from legal employment. Even when refugees have the right to work, there are often significant barriers restricting their access to the formal labor market. To address this challenge in Indonesia, UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, with support from the Digital Innovation Fund, is testing approaches to enable refugees to improve their employability and mobility through the practical application of digital and vocational skills via internships.

By harnessing refugees’ existing capacities and providing opportunities to learn and apply new skills, the pilot has directly strengthened the employability and self-reliance of around 190 refugees through skill-building and, in the case of 51 participants, internships. Beyond the ongoing impact on the lives of participants, this pilot, through the partnerships it forged, has expanded the opportunities available to all forcibly displaced people in Indonesia — by sensitizing private companies to the possibility of on-the-job training for refugees and by including forcibly displaced people in a national qualifications framework.

Labor mobility and digital skills in Indonesia

In Indonesia, refugees and asylum seekers do not have the right to work and many lack awareness about the labor mobility options or opportunities that are available to them. Even if they are aware of these avenues, they may have no access to the necessary digital devices, struggle to complete online-only processes, or encounter prohibitive language barriers.

Digital skills are essential for nearly all jobs today. Without these skills, refugees risk being locked out of opportunities for both local livelihoods (in countries where these are legally accessible) and international mobility. To address these challenges, this pilot project aims to enhance digital protection through delivering digital skills training, enabling forcibly displaced people in Indonesia to connect to labor mobility platforms and safely use digital platforms when seeking and performing work.

Previous pilots in Indonesia sought to build digital skills using curricula co-created with refugees, but feedback suggested participants wanted more targeted and applied training. So, UNHCR Indonesia pivoted to develop a pilot project that not only provides digital skills that would allow refugees to take part in digital livelihoods but, equally importantly, broadens the training to include vocational skills to strengthen their employability. This new project also builds on the previous efforts by developing a concrete means whereby participants can access on-the-job training.

Practical skills and real-world training

The pilot consisted of three key phases: 1) specialized training, including in IT and digital skills, 2) internships with identified partners to enhance future employability, and 3) information sessions on connections to work opportunities in third countries. Initially, to find participants, UNHCR Indonesia used the local UNHCR-run Help website to provide information on the opportunity. UNHCR also engaged with refugee-led organizations and representatives of the refugee community to identify potential participants, to ensure both that the training reached individuals who would benefit and that it took their skills and preferences into account.

To focus on the development of in-demand skills, the UNHCR team first identified key skill gaps experienced by potential resettlement countries (for instance, Australia and Canada) using resources compiled by Talent Beyond Boundaries. They then sourced training programmes that could help refugees fill these gaps, including back-end engineering, digital marketing, cybersecurity, digital storytelling, caregiving, aged care, and pediatrics. A total of 117 participants took part in the skills training, of which 97 successfully graduated.

After the completion of the training phase, 51 of the project participants were successfully paired with companies — including partners Caregiver Indonesia, Alterra Academy, Refuture Indonesia, and Yayasan Karya Kasih Medan — to participate in internship programmes. Internships offered refugees something they had never been able to access before in Indonesia: a chance to apply their learning in real workplaces. For many, this could be their first line on a CV that might one day open doors to resettlement or international employment.

From the outset, feedback from refugees highlighted the importance of training that helps translate knowledge into practice. As such, trainees in storytelling and digital skills, for instance, used their sketching, design, social media, and video editing skills, while back-end engineering trainees built websites and developed self-guided online learning modules. Following the completion of the project, surveyed trainees pointed to the on-the-job training as the most useful aspect of this project. One person who completed training in back-end development noted:

“I only have a little bit of experience in programming, so I was hesitant to dive deeper into programming projects. However, after doing the final project and on-the-job training, I now feel more confident to start my own project.”

To widen the project’s reach, an additional 100 skilled refugees across five major refugee-hosting Indonesian cities joined the other participants for the final phase. This session focused on work opportunities in third countries, a CV-developing workshop (including one-on-one coaching and feedback), and applying digital skills to create individual profiles on the Talent Beyond Boundaries online catalogue as well as LinkedIn.

Partnerships: Making a difference

The partnerships forged as part of this pilot were key to its success — and are already paving the way toward a brighter future for forcibly displaced people in Indonesia. Collaboration with private sector partners enabled UNHCR to:

• Provide internships: Several partnerships from the private sector provided internships for refugees, at a time when some programmes were facing difficulties finding companies willing to do so, due to uncertainty over whether refugees in Indonesia are legally permitted to participate in on-the-job training (OJT).
• Create clarity among companies to facilitate refugee participation in OJT: Although the Government of Indonesia allows refugees to take part in OJT, many private companies were uncertain about how this works in practice — making them less likely to create opportunities for forcibly displaced people. One important outcome of the pilot has been to create confidence and clarity amongst companies in Indonesia — those who were directly involved as partners in the pilot as well as others — that refugees are legally permitted to participate in OJT and can be tapped as a valuable workforce. To achieve this, UNHCR Indonesia and partners actively reached out to partner networks of companies to introduce the pilot and raise awareness about the situation of refugees, in particular helping them see how internship placement can help support refugees’ career and life in the long-term.
• Enable refugees to earn nationally recognized certification: One of the pilot project’s private sector partners, Caregiver Indonesia, successfully advocated with the Indonesian government to allow on-the-job training (rather than prior work experience) to fulfil the eligibility requirements for the national skill qualification exams, and for refugees to be able to take these exams. As a result, 15 project participants have successfully earned national skill competency certificates, which could be a powerful tool to expand employment options and help build credibility. This development illustrates how a private sector partnership, in close collaboration with UNHCR, can play a critical role in tipping lobbying outcomes with government agencies.

Responding to real needs and creating a supportive environment

Throughout this pilot project, emphasis was placed on delivering support aligned to market demands and the preferences of participants, to ensure the trainings were contextually relevant and able to effectively advance self-reliance. Key lessons developed over the course of implementation included:

• Listen to refugees and adjust (quickly): Training courses poorly matched to participants’ existing skills and expectations are likely to result in non-completion. Initially, the pilot’s back-end engineering course saw a 38% dropout rate. So, the team worked with Altera Academy — who convened the course — to conduct a focus group discussion and determine the cause of dropouts. The findings (the course contents were too advanced, compounded by difficulties in managing both in-class and personal responsibilities) resulted in Altera promptly making adjustments to ensure that the training modalities better matched participants’ needs. This included providing greater flexibility (lighter workload and more make-up sessions) to enable participants to keep pace. After the adjustments were made, 84% of participants completed the trainings.
• Provide a friendly learning environment through peer support: In addition to completing their digital courses online on an individual basis, participants also received learning support through peer discussions with mentors, and WhatsApp coaching to discuss assignments, to help build a more inclusive learning environment. This approach has proven to be an effective way to recap and consolidate recent learnings and to ensure participants feel accompanied and supported in their training.
• Find alignment between market demand and refugee preferences: The skill training programme developed by UNHCR Indonesia selected focus areas to reflect in-demand market skills, to give participants the best chance to secure employment, but it also took into consideration the preferences expressed by refugees during focus group discussions, in which refugee women indicated they preferred hard skill training. For example, “caregiver” is listed by Talent Beyond Boundaries as one of the top three jobs in demand in Canada and Australia — both strong resettlement partners. Caregiving training was also identified by refugees as a priority. This is critical, as internal motivation from learners is a key to success.

Blazing a new trail

The project participants are already reaping the benefit of being more employable, with a graduate from the digital marketing training securing an online job abroad and three graduates from the back-end engineering programme also landing employment. With around 200 refugees newly equipped with the skills they need to forge careers and pursue self-reliance — demonstrating the efficacy of this approach — the pilot is looking to ensure these opportunities are more broadly available.

UNHCR Indonesia plans to share the pilot experience with companies and encourage replication, by developing a one-pager on how refugees can be included in internship programmes. Initiatives like this pilot project are a stepping stone toward a dignified life for refugees — and the increasing strain placed on humanitarian assistance and the resettlement system means they are more essential than ever.

Critically, however, they are just one piece of the puzzle. Ensuring refugees are able to pursue dignified work opportunities — whether online or as part of alternative resettlement pathways –is essential to ensuring such skill-building initiatives have an enduring impact. As one participant in the digital storytelling training said:

“Some friends have asked me to design for them. I have made a tournament poster and a menu for a friend’s business — all for free. So far, I do feel ready to land a job and I’ll be learning more about my craft when I get to work.”

Developing new paths toward self-sufficiency for refugees is beneficial for host economies and societies. By enabling refugees to access and obtain work, we can help shift societal attitudes towards refugees and strengthen social cohesion. Perhaps countries in the region with protracted refugee situations can take their cue from Thailand, which recently granted long-staying refugees from Myanmar the right to work in the country. By truly unlocking the potential of refugees, host countries can help tackle the humanitarian challenge head on by offering practical solutions while creating a new engine of growth.

Read more about UNHCR’s digital livelihoods and digital innovation work.

Begin with the end in mind: Reducing barriers to refugees’ access to work was originally published in UNHCR Innovation on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.