GRF Progress Review 2025 - Linked Side Event Summary

🚨🚶 Freedom of movement – within a country or across borders – is not a peripheral protection issue or optional add-on, but a “structural enabler of dignity, opportunity, and autonomy.”

Refugee self-reliance strategies that ignore mobility, as well as access to education, employment, livelihoods, markets, networks, and services that underpin independence, social contribution, and development, “risk becoming rhetorical rather than transformative.”

During the GRF Progress Review held in December 2025, a side event on the theme “Beyond Refugee Camps: Advancing Freedom of Movement as a Foundation for Refugee Self-Reliance” was convened by RELON UGANDA and partners, including UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, Oxfam, and Woord en Daad, bringing together representatives from refugee-led organisations, UN agencies, international NGOs, faith-based entities, and government-adjacent institutions to examine a shared message that emerged repeatedly throughout discussions:

💬 Refugees cannot achieve meaningful self-reliance unless they are granted the same functional liberties, are able to move freely, work, and pursue studies in conditions comparable to those of host community members.

While global, regional, and national policy frameworks increasingly emphasise refugee self-reliance, participants stressed that the objective remains unattainable where refugees’ mobility is restricted, documentation is inaccessible, or rights exist only on paper – stalling progress. The event deliberately centred refugee-led perspectives to ground policy debates in lived experience and to move beyond abstract commitments toward coordinated action and practical, implementable solutions.

📓 Read the session summary below for more. 👇