What 75 years of refugee protection should teach us

Its shops and homes store memories and traditions of tripartite common heritage. Of our roughly 100,000 residents, more than 25,000 are migrants and refugees. 

I am one of them. I have been a refugee in the then Sudan (in the region that is now South Sudan) and Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo). I am also this municipality’s first directly elected mayor.

This year marks the 75th anniversary of the 1951 Refugee Convention, the treaty that first codified how the world can help people fleeing violence and persecution.

I think we need to use this occasion to ask a harder question: how do we improve the implementation of the 1951 Convention to match the world refugees actually live in today?

The Convention was written for a different century — one of encampment, of temporary exile, of the assumption that displacement was a passing emergency to be managed until people could go home. That assumption no longer holds. 

Today, over 117.8 million people are forcibly displaced worldwide, and the nature of their displacement has changed. 

Refugees are not simply waiting in camps for war to end. Increasingly, they are moving into towns and cities, in search of the same things any of us want: work, connectivity, dignity, and a chance to build something.

Uganda has long been held up as a model for its progressive refugee policy. I am proud of that record. But I have watched the gap widen between what the Convention’s principles promise and what shrinking humanitarian budgets can actually deliver.

As international support recedes, the living conditions for refugees in settlements have deteriorated, and disease and psychological trauma have followed. Meanwhile, the very trend that should be reshaping our policy response — the movement of refugees into secondary cities and municipalities— has barely registered in how refugee programming gets designed or funded.

Here is what I mean. Refugee policy, even at its most well-intentioned, is still built around the logic of the camp: count new arrivals, count settlements, measure success in humanitarian caseloads.

But the refugees I govern are not, for the most part, in settlements. They are shopkeepers, students, tradespeople, mothers running small businesses two streets from my office.

Uganda’s own government has begun to recognise this, opening a review of its draft national refugee policy in 2025 that acknowledges the shift toward urban settlement.

That review is necessary. It is also overdue, and Uganda is hardly unique. This same migration toward towns and cities is unfolding across host countries globally.

In Koboko, we built what I call, without false modesty, the Koboko Model: a philosophy of direct funding to local government, paired with the discretion to design local solutions to solve what is ultimately a global challenge.

Instead of routing refugee assistance exclusively through camp administrations or national ministries, we asked what would happen if a municipality — the level of government closest to where refugees actually live their daily lives — had the resources and the mandate to integrate them directly into local economic life.

The results have persuaded me that refugees are not a burden to be managed. They are an opportunity for cities and secondary cities as a source of labour, entrepreneurship and demand that if, properly supported, they can strengthen the town’s local economic development.

This is what I would ask the international community to take from the 75th anniversary of the 1951 Convention: not another round of reaffirmation, but a genuine reckoning with where power and funding sit.

Put resources and discretionary authority directly in the hands of municipal and city governments. Recognise refugees’ right to meaningful participation.

Refugees should be on the table of programming as actors, with explicit roles in shaping the policies that govern their lives, rather than treating them as passive recipients of aid designed elsewhere.

Support the shift already underway from a settlement-based response to a route-based, urban-inclusive one.

Institutionalise and mainstream refugee programming within local government itself, so that inclusion survives the turnover of mayors and the whims of donor cycles.

The Convention’s authors could not have anticipated a world of 117.8 million displaced people, most of them stuck not in the aftermath of a single war but in the accumulating wreckage of many.

But they got one thing profoundly right: protection is not charity, it is obligation. Seventy five years later, I would only add that obligation has to be discharged somewhere.

In my experience, it is most often discharged not in the halls where the Convention was signed, but in places like Koboko — small, crowded, ordinary towns where refugees and their neighbours are already building a shared life, with or without the world’s permission.

The writer, Dr. Wilson Kirkfixer Sanya, is the outgoing mayor of Koboko Municipality in northwestern Uganda.