The Connectivity for Refugees initiative, one year in

Connectivity has never been more critical for people forced to flee, as it opens pathways toward greater information access, education, livelihoods, leisure activities, and enhanced humanitarian protection.

UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, and other humanitarian organizations are rapidly accelerating their digital transformations and shifting toward the provision of digital services. Meanwhile, forcibly displaced communities are articulating, with urgency, the importance of connectivity as a basic and fundamental need and a right. However, in the absence of a holistic response to connectivity challenges facing forcibly displaced populations, too many are still left behind.

So, at the 2023 Global Refugee Forum, UNHCR, the Government of Luxembourg, ITU, and the GSMA came together to launch Connectivity for Refugees (CfR) — an initiative that aims to advance the availability and affordability of connectivity for 20 million forcibly displaced people and their host communities by 2030.​ To achieve this goal, CfR seeks to bring together a wide range of private sector and non-profit organizations, governments, and forcibly displaced communities.

It’s an ambitious agenda and a diverse coalition! Roughly one year on from the launch of this transformative initiative, we’re taking stock of the progress made and the work ahead.

A clear action plan

CfR partners are operationalizing the initiative’s ambitions and addressing connectivity challenges through a holistic, multi-stakeholder and coordinated approach. We are taking actions to:

• Understand local challenges: Ensuring that strong data is gathered around connectivity needs of communities and connectivity gaps and challenges for evidenced-based strategy and impact measurement.
• Coordinate stakeholders: Integrating into existing coordination mechanisms and establishing new ones, where needed, to build alignment across efforts and amplify the necessity and challenges of meaningful connectivity (e.g., including Connectivity for Refugees in Refugee Response Plans).
• Deploy innovative connectivity solutions: Improving access to meaningful connectivity at both the communal and individual level through infrastructure expansion, affordable pricing schemes, digital literacy enhancement, and other mechanisms that focuses on sustainable and market-based principles.
• Scale what works: Building knowledge and strengthen business cases for financiers across the development and private sector to support long-term solutions.
• Advocate for long term, viable digital inclusion outcomes: In partnership with governments, private sector, and financiers, devise pathways for solutions that move towards inclusivity of refugees and host communities in national approaches and development plans.

Progress made in 2024

In the year since the initiative was launched, CfR partners — with additional resource support from the Government of Luxembourg, the Government of Spain, and Cisco — have been laying the groundwork to realize our ambitions, by accelerating alignment between connectivity ecosystem stakeholders, gathering timely information to better understand connectivity challenges for refugees, and building capacity locally to address those barriers.

Here’s a brief glance at how we’ve been setting the stage to deliver meaningful connectivity to displaced communities around the world:

• Enhancing ecosystem coordination and alignment with other connectivity efforts and development actors, including participation in the Giga Connectivity Forum and consultations with the Emergency Telecoms Cluster (ETC).
• Supporting 10 countries to address connectivity barriers, with support from UNHCR country operations and national governments. The countries we’re already working with are Angola, Chad, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Ethiopia, Iraq, Malaysia, Mauritania, Rwanda, South Sudan, and Uganda.
• Recruitment of connectivity coordinators in several countries to design and execute context-specific connectivity agendas and convene stakeholders across sectors.
• Conducting connectivity evidence gathering across countries, including reports summarizing existing data on the status of connectivity and three primary data collection exercises applying GSMA’s Humanitarian Connectivity, Needs and Usage Assessment (CoNUA) Toolkit to inform the design of context-specific and evidence-based connectivity solutions.
• Facilitating the advancement of digital education efforts through providing hardware support in South Sudan that connect schools to the internet, ensuring students have access to online learning materials and activities.
• Planning the deployment of connectivity initiatives to address common connectivity-related issues such as unreliable electricity, unstable internet, unaffordable devices, unaffordable connectivity, low digital literacy, and unfavourable policy and regulatory environments in countries including Angola, Chad, Ethiopia, South Sudan, and DRC.

Building on this foundation in 2025

The progress made in 2024 has laid the groundwork for this initiative to deliver meaningful impact in 2025. As we look to the year ahead, CfR will be prioritising:

• Expanding the global CfR network and building strategic alliances: Engaging a broader range of stakeholders across sectors to accelerate CfR objectives and build alignment between existing connectivity initiatives.
• Amplifying our reach: Bringing on more in-country connectivity coordinators to deepen our in-country impact, build out CfR networks at the local level, and galvanize meaningful action in support of refugee and host connectivity.
• Strengthening our connectivity evidence base: Creating a clear picture of connectivity gaps and how refugees interact with connectivity services in our focus countries to ensure CfR interventions are driven by accurate, timely, and actionable insights.
• Deploying connectivity solutions: Empowering CfR partners to directly implement strategic projects, working collaboratively with internet service providers and development finance institutions, advocating for enabling policies and regulatory environments to governments to deploy both individual and community level connectivity. CfR is already putting this approach into action for next year. For example, four cyber cafés will open across refugee camps in eastern Chad. In Angola, a new connectivity link into Lovua camp will bring internet access where there previously was none. In Ethiopia, new charging stations will be put in place in various camps to support communal use and enable better service delivery from UNHCR staff members. In South Sudan, CfR is providing assessment and technical support to the National Communication Authority (NCA) on its project to bring connectivity and digital education to several refugee camps. Finally, a new multimedia space in the DRC run by a local Congolese organization, will provide out-of-camp populations in Nzakara with opportunities for online education, digital literacy training, and vital connections with their families.
• Mapping of schools: Supporting digital education efforts in addressing school connectivity gaps and enhancing community connectivity via these facilities.

As we reflect on a year of progress, CfR has laid a strong foundation in local and global partnership building and evidence gathering to drive context-specific and sustainable connectivity solutions. Looking ahead, we are poised to scale our efforts in 2025, driving forward strategic partnerships and tangible impact in countries across geographies to ensure refugees and their hosts are meaningfully included in a digitally connected future.