CONCERN WORLDWIDE
In the past decade, the global refugee population has more than doubled, reaching more than 26 million refugees. A common misconception, however, is where refugees flee to.
In most cases, they aren’t able to make it to Europe or North America, and instead take shelter in neighbouring countries. Often these countries are also dealing with their own crises that displace large portions of their population. We’ll look at how that breaks down in this roundup of the 12 countries that take in the most refugees.
For this list, we’re focusing specifically on refugees and listing them by country of origin for this accounting. We’re also using the UNHCR’s data, recent as of the beginning of 2021.
12. Chad
By the UNHCR’s calculations, Chad is the twelfth-largest host community for refugees, with more than 478,600 refugees recorded in 2020 — a number that’s nearly doubled when you factor in other people of concern including internally-displaced Chadians. Around the remote and insecure Lake Chad Basin, which hosts many refugees, various armed groups remain active and violence is never too far away, making it only a marginally better alternative than the contexts that have uprooted neighbouring refugee populations.
The majority of refugees currently in Chad come from neighbouring Sudan, and are predominantly women and children. This vulnerability, combined with the living conditions in the camps of eastern Chad, means that security — especially against gender-based violence — is a major risk. The country is also the third-largest host community for refugees from the Central African Republic, which shares a southern border with Chad. Both countries are, according to the Food and Agriculture Organisation, among the worst-scoring countries on the FAO and Fund for Peace Fragile States Index — which has left both as two of the hungriest countries in the world. Hunger and nutrition become even greater concerns in informal refugee communities.
11. Democratic Republic of Congo
Many countries with the highest refugee populations are also countries that produce high numbers of refugees. The Democratic Republic of Congo is one such country. Its current crisis (which has displaced over 807,000 Congolese) is rooted in the violence that erupted when it became a host community to hundreds of thousands of Rwandan refugees following the 1994 genocide.
Yet the DRC is also host to over 490,000 refugees. Rwanda remains the biggest contributor to the DRC’s refugee population, accounting for over 213,000 mainly still in the eastern region of Goma. This made 2021’s Mount Nyiragongo eruption an even more dire situation as it uprooted several refugee communities in the area. The DRC is also a major host community for the Central African Republic (175,000), South Sudan (54,000), and Burundi (47,000).
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