According to the Special Adviser on Solutions to Internal Displacement, Robert Andrew Piper, this group represents the vast majority of the 120 million people forcibly displaced in the world, but they are relatively invisible despite their number.

“Unlike refugees and migrants, they have not crossed an international border. There is no specific agency, nor a treaty or global pact for internally displaced people, nor an international day that singles them out, and their number has doubled in the last 10 years,” he said.

However, the expert recognized progress in the legal frameworks of some countries that have implemented new laws and policies on the subject, such as Chad, Nigeria and the Philippines.

Other nations such as Iraq, the Central African Republic, Colombia, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Libya, Mozambique and Somalia made collective commitments to put more than 11.5 million internally displaced people on a solution path with the launch of an action plan by mid-2022.

“Several governments around the world have developed national solutions, strategies, specific plans that set out what it will take to move their displaced people to be settled. Who will do what, how much it will cost, what options are available,” he said in that regard.

The UN, he said, has reconfigured its own structures and policies to be more suitable for the purpose of supporting its members in this task. “We have accompanied these governments every step of the way in articulating their solution plans. Individual agencies have reworked their internal agreements, committing more money and people, a lot of investment in data systems, in search capacity,” he detailed.

At the same time, the agency strengthened its teams in those nations and created a new solutions fund to help teams move faster.

The plan also included placing new experts in country offices along with systems to bring more development and peacebuilding assets to the task, all under the leadership of the resident coordinator, the top UN official in each nation.

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