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Roadmap to the Sustainable and Responsible Financial Inclusion of Forcibly Displaced Persons

Attachments

I. Executive Summary

Financial services offer vital tools to forcibly displaced persons (FDPs) who are forced to leave their homes due to conflict, persecution, violence, or human rights violations. These tools, when designed appropriately and backed by robust national policies and regulation, help FDPs to safely store money, send or receive money transfers, and build up a transaction history that helps them to access services such as credit and insurance when needed. They are more necessary now than ever for helping FDPs to rebuild their livelihoods and contribute to their host communities. Why? The scope of global displacement today is unprecedented: as of 2018, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) estimates that there are 70.8 million forcibly displaced persons (FDPs) worldwide with 13.6 million newly displaced in 2018, equivalent to an average

of 37,000 people being forced to flee their homes every day in 2018. The vast majority of forced displacement situations last longer than five years, and more than half of those displaced live in urban areas. Furthermore, 84% of refugees worldwide live in developing countries, where large parts of the host population face significant development challenges. Yet, large gaps in access to appropriate financial services remain for FDPs, both inside and outside of camps. Through the promotion of jobs and livelihoods for refugees, the UN Global Compact on Refugees – which was adopted by the UN General Assembly in December 2018 – calls for support to facilitate access to affordable financial products and services for host and refugee communities (Paragraph 71).

This Roadmap contributes to efforts to tackle this problem by building on the 2017 GPFI Policy Paper on Financial Inclusion of Forcibly Displaced Persons – Priorities for G20 Action (short: the GPFI Policy Paper). It offers a set of key policy recommendations for each stakeholder group involved in the financial inclusion of FDPs: governments, the private sector, humanitarian and development agencies, research organisations, and the standard setting bodies (SSBs).

The Roadmap focuses on six interconnected clusters that have been identified based on an ex- amination of the main barriers to the sustainable and responsible financial inclusion of FDPs:

National Strategies and Regulation
Resiliency of Financial Infrastructure
Customer Identification
Financial Customer and Data Protection
Bringing Humanitarian Aid and Development
Economic Participation

These interconnecting clusters highlight the importance of collaboration and cooperation between all stakeholders, while recognising that most effective policy and programmatic ap- proaches will differ depending on the context. Each set of key policy recommendations carefully considers and takes into account the need for FDPs to be active economic actors who enable their own self-reliance, and contribute to the economic development of their host communities. This can be supported by increasing access to financial services as well as opportunities for legal eco- nomic participation. Finally, the recommendations stress the importance of research, evidence and testing to encourage innovation, highlight the viewpoints of FDPs themselves, and identify those solutions that are most scaleable.