On September 2nd, 2015 the world woke up to the appalling photograph of a dead toddler lying on a beach in Turkey. The child Aylan Kurdi was three years old. He along with his parents were escaping Syria and fleeing to Europe after Canada rejected their refugee application. Aylan his mother and brother drowned in the Mediterranean Sea. The family was among thousands of Syrian refugees who are fleeing the war-torn country to nearby Europe. The chilling picture has caused global outrage and intense global attention to migration caused by war, political instability and a complete breakdown of law and order in their native land.
Refugee crisis can refer to movements of large groups of displaced persons, who could be either internally displaced persons, refugees or other migrants. It can also refer to incidents in the country of origin or departure, to large problems whilst on the move or even after arrival in a safe country that involve large groups of displaced persons, asylum seekers or refugees.
REASONS
War and civil war
Human rights violations
Environment and climate
Economic hardship
The European migrant crisis, or less precisely European refugee crisis, began in 2015 when rising immigration numbers of unauthorized foreign migrants arrived in the European Union (EU), travelling across the Mediterranean Sea or overland through Southeast Europe. These unauthorized foreign migrants encompassed not only asylees seeking to apply for refugee status and the right of asylum in claims to be individually determined as genuine or not, but also encompassed various others, such as economic migrants and hostile agents including "Islamic State militants".
A BROKEN SYSTEM
The world’s system for protecting refugees is broken. It is obvious - from Australia to South Sudan’s vast camps, from Istanbul’s cold streets to the European Union’s heavily fortified walls.
Worldwide, more than 21 million people have been forced to seek sanctuary abroad. Governments have a duty to help them. But most rich countries are still treating refugees as somebody else’s problem. Hiding behind closed borders and fears of being “flooded”, they have conveniently allowed poorer, mainly Middle Eastern, African and South Asian countries, to host an incredible 86% of all refugees.
And by ignoring most appeals for humanitarian aid, they have left UN agencies so broke they can’t even feed many refugees properly anymore.
This has to change, now. Amnesty is putting forward eight solutions for how world leaders – in particular the richest countries – can start tackling this massive humanitarian crisis together.
Eight ways to solve the crisis
1. Opening up safe routes to sanctuary for refugees is one important solution. That means allowing people to reunite with their relatives, and giving refugees visas so they don’t have to spend their life savings and risk drowning to reach safety.
2. It also means resettling all refugees who need it. Resettlement is a vital solution for the most vulnerable refugees – including torture survivors and people with serious medical problems.
Right now, 1.2 million people urgently need this lifeline.
Saving lives
3. World leaders also need to put saving lives first. No one should have to die crossing a border, and yet almost 7,000 people drowned in the Mediterranean alone in the two years since the first big shipwreck in October 2013.
Thousands of people fleeing persecution in Myanmar suffered for weeks on board boats while Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia bickered over who should help them in May 2015.
States can stop this by investing in search and rescue operations and immediately helping people in distress.
4. And whether they travel by land or by sea, people fleeing persecution or wars should be allowed to cross borders, with or without travel documents. Pushing people back and putting up massive fences only forces them to take more dangerous routes to safety.
Stop trafficking and racism
5. All countries should investigate and prosecute trafficking gangs who exploit refugees and migrants, and put people’s safety above all else. Survivors whom Amnesty met in Southeast Asia said traffickers killed people on board boats when their families couldn’t pay ransoms. Others were thrown overboard and left to drown, or died from because there was no food and water.
6. Governments also need to stop blaming refugees and migrants for economic and social problems, and instead combat all kinds of xenophobia and racial discrimination. Doing otherwise is deeply unfair, stirs up tensions and fear of foreigners, and sometimes leads to violence – even death.
In Durban, South Africa, at least four people died, many were seriously injured, and over 1,000 mainly Burundian and Congolese refugees forced to flee after violence and looting broke out in April and May 2015.
START FUNDING 'BROKE' UN PROPERLY
Asylum is a human right
8. The world has a very short memory. In the aftermath of World War II, most countries agreed to protect refugees through the 1951 Refugee Convention, and through UN agencies like the UNHCR.
Barbed wire fences and chronic underfunding have left that vision of a better world in tatters. By ignoring the warning signs, world leaders have allowed a huge, global humanitarian crisis to unfold. Ultimately, it will be resolved by ending the conflicts and persecution that forced people to flee in the first place.
But no one knows when that will be. Meanwhile, we need radical solutions, visionary leadership and global co-operation on a scale not seen for 70 years. That involves setting up strong refugee systems: allowing people to apply for asylum, treating their refugee claims fairly, resettling the most vulnerable of all, and providing basics like education and healthcare.
None of these eight solutions are impossible to achieve, if politicians listen to the millions of people saying “I welcome refugees”, and put solidarity and compassion above petty wrangling over who should host a few thousand refugees.
Social Entrepreneurship in the times of the refugee crisis
In a society and world that seems to be shaken by one economic, social and political crisis after another, social entrepreneurs are celebrated to be today’s disruptors and tomorrow’s brightest stars.
Especially projects claiming to find an “innovative” solution to the migration crisis, seem to be spreading like mushrooms – more than 700 of them alone in Germany. The variety of offered services and products is wide. Take for an example an app that is supposed to facilitate communication or a fancy boat ride on the Aegean Sea where people from first world countries come together to “philosophize” about solutions for migrants without them being included in the idea process. In the meantime, conflicts in refugee camps arise from being literally stuck, and this not in the sense of cosy summer camp conditions, while authorities do not have the manpower, overwhelmed by the amount of paper work stacking on their desk.
But who really profits from such “great” ideas?
Is it considered “social” if wannabe “entrepreneurs” are literally capitalising on the misery of vulnerable people?
But let’s take one step at a time: Who is even an “entrepreneur”?
French economist Jean Baptiste Say, said once: “The entrepreneur shifts economic resources out of an area of lower and into an area of higher productivity and greater yield”. Joseph Schumpeter identified similarly in the 20th century entrepreneurs as the catalysts and innovators behind economic progress, while Peter Drucker explained that an entrepreneur is someone that is exploiting opportunities. Seeing possibilities rather than problems.
According to this definition, they seem to be entrepreneurs. But he also mentioned that not every (not-for- profit) organization is entrepreneurial. The real struggle of a true entrepreneur is usually to make people understand how their product/ service can enhance our life, trying to find investors especially in the early stages of the lifecycle of their start-up.
So can you consider somebody that spends charity money an “entrepreneur”? Going further, only a few ideas include migrants actually as valuable parts of their teams. Shouldn’t it be mandatory for any start-up in order to understand their so called “core costumer” or beneficiary?
In addition, a “social entrepreneur” should have a social motivation. “Mission-related impact becomes the central criterion, not wealth creation”[1], the core principle distinguishing them from business entrepreneurs. There were always social entrepreneurs out there, even before the migration crisis, but nobody took those serious until it became recently a profitable business, easy and fast money to raise, no long-term view or customer-binding needed.
Furthermore, social entrepreneurship is commonly defined to achieve large scale, systemic and sustainable social change through a new invention. Bringing a profound social transformation means hereby to create a prosperous, stable and peaceful new system that is fundamentally different than the world that preceded it.
How is it a more just and fundamentally different world, if the only ones that profit are those with the “business” idea, but the core problems, namely the ongoing conflicts in the regions and the forced displacement of people, are still existing?
European Commission Vice-President Kristalina Georgieva said about the 2017 EU budget “(…).We continue to focus our budget on results, ensuring that every euro from the EU budget will make a difference.” But to be true, the EU and donor organisations seem to spend a great amount of money on projects that are still focused on short-term solutions. And even here, decisions are usually being made by people who have never lived in an emergency state/ a third world country, studied in the most prestigious and expensive universities and never heard of the expression “making a living” so they can’t even slightly understand what the real needs and priorities of the most vulnerable amongst us are.
Moreover, what will happen to these start-ups that are only focused on finding these temporary solutions, all those apps/ specifically designed products and services after the migration wave? In which way is this sustainable? Why don’t we stop duplicating project ideas, using the already existing apps, hubs and co-working spaces etc. and instead spend money on “scaling up” on already existing solutions/ start-ups?
In addition, we should rather focus on projects involving migrants as partners of projects in social enterprises, inspired by refugee social entrepreneurs themselves while thinking about the aftermath and local development of the states of origin, rather than celebrating those so claimed “social entrepreneurs” taking nice pictures with Head of XY, Minister XY or Senior Executive of multinational XY, instead of being out there actively engaged, claiming they found a solution from far without even being in contact with their target group.
Furthermore, let’s also do not forget the numerous positive examples of organisations and projects that even before the migration crisis linked social entrepreneurship and human rights. Innovative social enterprises that have been set-up with human rights issues at their core. Let’s also do not forget about the coast guards who are out there at sea, showing humanity by giving the most vulnerable a hand, gesturing that they are equal and welcome, forgetting for a minute their protocol to make a person smile that has seen the unspeakable .
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/11848875/Refugee-crisis-The-latest-in-pictures.html
https://www.indy100.com/article/these-moving-photos-of-the-refugee-crisis-just-won-a-pulitzer-prize--bkKjVngIbb
https://www.buzzfeed.com/lynzybilling/these-are-the-most-powerful-photographs-of-the-syrian-refuge?utm_term=.de33341Lx#.viMKKpl4o
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2015/10/eight-solutions-world-refugee-crisis/
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