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When we entered 2021, there were 82.4 million people worldwide displaced by conflict or harassment.
Thirty million of them are refugees, the rest are displaced in their country (48 million) or asylum seekers (4.1 million), according to the latest UNHCR data report. Nearly half of these forcibly displaced people are children.
55% of the refugees come from three countries: Syria, Palestine and Venezuela.
In the COVID-19 pandemic, “everything else has stopped, including the economy, but wars and conflicts and violence and discrimination and harassment, all the factors that led these people to flee, have continued,” said UNHCR leader Filippo Grandi.
Refugee travel during 2020
In 2020, 1.27 million people from 64 countries were refugees. The infographic below shows the desperate journeys these people made despite the additional challenges posed by COVID-19.
Africa accounts for more than a third of the world’s displaced people. By the end of 2020, at least 30.6 million people had been displaced across the continent.
In 2020, nearly 60,000 refugees fled Ethiopia to neighboring countries as a result of various violence in the East African country. In November 2020, fighting broke out in the northern Tigray region of Ethiopia, displacing more than a million people according to International Organization for Migration.
In the Middle East, Syrian refugees continued to flee the country’s 10-year war, with nearly 134,000 fleeing in 2020. Half of them (65,000) fled to neighboring Turkey, which now hosts the world’s largest refugee community – 3.7 million people. In the same year, almost a quarter of Syrian refugees (32,500) arrived in Germany.
In Latin America, nearly 400,000 refugees fled Venezuela after the country’s political and economic crisis. Of these, 139,000 were registered on the run to Peru, 80,000 to the Dominican Republic and 60,000 to Brazil.
In Asia, the UN registered at least 29,000 refugees from Myanmar. Almost all of these refugees arrived in the Indian (17,000) and Bangladesh (12,000) districts.
In Europe, at least 89,000 refugees fled Azerbaijan to Armenia after a 44-day fighting between Armenia and the conflict between Azerbaijani forces in Nagorno-Karabakh territory.
Across the Atlantic, during 2020, the United States received 8,500 refugees from 20 countries. Nearly half of these refugees came from only three countries: Venezuela (1,600), El Salvador (1,200) and Guatemala (1,100). That is much lower than in 2019 when the country took in 32,000 refugees.
Canada will receive 7,500 refugees from 21 countries by 2020. The main countries of origin were Nigeria (1,400), Iran (1,200) and Hungary (629). On the other side of the world, Australia received only 956 refugees by 2020 – most from Iran.
Where are the largest refugee camps?
They want refugee camps to be a safe temporary shelter to meet the basic needs of refugees. However, many people end up living in these camps in recent decades. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Kenya: “Many displaced people have been living in temporary shelters as refugees for more than 16 years.”
The infographic below highlights some of the largest refugee camps in the world.
The Kutupalong camp Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, is the largest refugee camp in the world. It was formed informally in the early 1990s after the Rohingya Rakhine minority state in Myanmar began to flee repression against them.
In 2017, savage crackdowns broke out across the state and the camp had to be significantly expanded, reaching a capacity of approximately 800,000 people.
On March 22, 2021, a huge fire engulfed a nearby refugee camp at Cox’s Bazar. Fifteen people were killed and tens of thousands were left homeless and without property.
The smoke comes from a fire at a Rohingya refugee camp in Balukhali. It destroyed hundreds of shelters and left thousands homeless. March 22, 2021 [Shafiqur Rahman/AP Photo]
The Dadaab refugee complex There are three large refugee camps in Kenya – Hagadera, Dagahaley and Ifo – and there are more than 200,000 refugees near the border with Somalia. Dadaab was founded in 1991 after the Somali civil war and spread in 2011 as a result of widespread drought and famine.
The Kakuma refugee camp At least 150,000 refugees live in northwestern Kenya, mostly from South Sudan and Somalia. The camp was founded in 1992 when thousands of Sudanese children fleeing the civil war arrived.
In March 2021, the Kenyan government announced that it would close the Dadaab and Kakuma refugee camps by June 30, 2022.
Kenya said in March that it planned to close two refugee camps to accommodate more than 400,000 people [Tony Karumba/ AFP]
The Zaatari refugee camp was created in Jordan in 2012 to take in Syrian refugees. Today, it is the largest Syrian refugee camp in the world. The world’s first COVID-19 vaccination center was opened in February 2021 in a refugee camp.
70-year-old refugee travel
In 1951, the UN established the 1951 Refugee Convention, created after the Second World War to protect the rights of refugees in Europe. In 1967, the agreement was expanded to address displacement from around the world.
The infographic below highlights 70 years of refugee travel, from 1951 to 2020. The number of refugees has doubled in the last decade from 15 million in 2011 to 30 million in 2020.
The situation of Palestinian refugees is the longest unresolved refugee problem in the world. On May 14, 1948, the British mandate for Palestine expired, leading to the First Arab-Israeli War. Zionist militias expelled at least 750,000 Palestinians. According to UNHCR data, by 1952 there were 867,000 Palestinian refugees. Currently, that number is 5.7 million.
Afghanistan is devastated by four decades of war. From 1979 to 1989 the country was one of the last battles of the Cold War, as Soviet troops waged a bloody guerrilla war against the mujahideen in Afghanistan. Over the next decade, the county continued to struggle. 12 years after the Soviet withdrawal, Afghanistan would invade itself again, this time by the US. The highest number of refugees in Afghanistan was recorded in 1990, where 6.3 million refugees were reported.
Which countries take in the most refugees today?
With a population of 6.7 million, Syria has the largest population of refugees currently Palestinians (5.7 million) and Venezuelans (4 million). By 2020, 88% of the world’s refugees were from only 12 countries.
Once received, 65% of the world’s refugees are taken in by only 16 countries. Turkey receives the most refugees (3.7 million) followed by Jordan (3 million) and Colombia (1.7 million).
In Europe, Germany is home to about 1.2 million refugees, the highest on the continent.
According to UNHCR, developing countries account for 86 percent of the world’s refugees.
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