CRRF

The Comprehensive Refugee Response Framework (CRRF) is a model for responding to large refugee situations, annexed to the New York Declaration for Refugees and Migrants adopted by the UN General Assembly in September 2016. It tasks UNHCR with leading a more predictable, multi-stakeholder response whenever significant refugee movements occur, and it later became the operational backbone of the Global Compact on Refugees (GCR), affirmed by the General Assembly in December 2018.

The CRRF rests on four objectives:

• Ease pressures on host countries that receive and shelter refugees.
• Enhance refugee self-reliance, including through access to work, education, and services.
• Expand access to third-country solutions, such as resettlement and complementary pathways.
• Support conditions in countries of origin for safe and dignified return.

Operationally, the CRRF moves beyond the traditional encampment-and-care model by integrating refugees into national systems (schools, health clinics, labour markets) and pulling in development actors like the World Bank, alongside humanitarian agencies. It emphasises whole-of-society engagement: governments, donors, civil society, the private sector, and refugees themselves.

A set of pilot countries rolled out the framework from 2017 onward, including Uganda, Ethiopia, Kenya, Djibouti, Chad, Somalia, Rwanda, Belize, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Panama, and several others under the regional MIRPS process in Central America and the IGAD process in the Horn of Africa. Uganda's progressive refugee policy — granting land plots, freedom of movement, and the right to work — is often cited as an early CRRF showcase, though implementation has faced funding shortfalls and absorption strains.

The CRRF is not a treaty and creates no new legal obligations; it is a coordination and policy framework that operationalises existing duties under the 1951 Refugee Convention and its 1967 Protocol. Its successes and gaps are reviewed at the Global Refugee Forum, convened every four years (first held in Geneva in December 2019, second in December 2023).