UN Geneva - Multimedia Newsroom : UNHCR Press conference - A year of COVID-19 pandemic

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen.

Thank you very much for joining us today for this expert briefing by UNHCR.

The briefing is entitled A Year of COVID Pandemic Impact on World's Refugees and Unhcr's Global Response.

We have two speakers for you today.

We have Sajid Malik, who's the Director of UNHCR, Division of Resilience and Solutions and we have Marian Shippelrod who's the Deputy Director also in UNHCR in the same division, which is the Division of Resilience and Solutions.

Both of the speakers will make short opening remarks.

We will then go to questions.

I would just like to outline a few basic rules for this press conference As for any other when once the floor is open for questions and you can already during the remarks raise your hand so we can identify you.

And so also that the colleagues from the United Nations television who are managing this virtual briefing can open your microphone so you can ask your question.

Please do state the outlet that you're working for as well as your name, and also do indicate to whom your question is is addressed.

Given that this is an expert briefing, we will be taking questions that are relevant to this matter.

We will not be able to address other issues in this briefing.

Obviously, we can do that either later or tomorrow.

There is a regular UN press briefing just to flag also that we shared with you our one pager giving you an idea of the overall response and the needs as well as you have access to the link with the latest data on the forcibly displaced populations around the world, which currently amount to 80 million people.

This is the data from December last year, which is effectively the population that is the size of Germany.

On that note, I would pass on 1st to Sajad and kindly ask for his microphone to be open.

Thank you.

Andrea, can you hear me?

Is it OK?

Yes, thank you very much and thanks for this opportunity.

One year in, in, in COVID, it's it's not something that that we we thought we are going to get into when this whole pandemic started.

But just to give you a very quick snapshot of of where we are today, the effect is far reaching.

There's no doubt about that.

It's like the same for national populations, their host communities, as it is for the refugees.

Andreas mentioned that we have some 80 million forcibly displaced, including 26,000,000 refugees in them who live in far-flung areas.

Many of them live in areas where they are very basic health infrastructure.

The education systems are basic, connectivity is not there.

The basic energy and lighting is is is not available in most of these areas to the extent that we could use those facilities.

The socio economic impact is, is quite stark in many of these areas, especially for those who are living in urban situations.

These were people, refugees and their host communities working on daily wages spaces.

And when the lockdowns happened, they lost their income quite rapidly and over a very short period of time, they went downward spiral of of poverty that is beginning to tell now.

With no income, they could not pay their their their rents, they could not for their healthcare.

They could not look after their children that they were looking at.

And that has really created a lot of hardships for the communities in urban areas.

In rural areas, health systems already struggling to cope with capacity for testing, isolating, treating those who develop symptoms of COVID-19 is also very limited in most of these countries.

They were already struggling in urban areas, but where refugees are hosted in rural areas, it's even more difficult.

Systems of tracing and quarantining contracts are difficult to put in place.

Many of the camps, as you know are overcrowded.

We had to put in systems in place where a social distancing could be practised.

We had to produce, provide additional water in many of these locations.

Remember 15 to 20 litres per person per day in an emergency is absolutely essential, which is not even available in some places.

So to bring extra water, extra hygiene for washing and all the rest was quite a massive undertaking that we had to take globally to make sure that we introduce social distancing, hygiene, introduce practises and food distribution system where they could come and queue up.

Same for the health centres and and a lot of community engagement of refugees in their host communities was was part of that.

We worked.

There was severe shortages of Ppes.

There were the health facilities were quite stretched.

They were not isolation walls.

We had to put up a lot of facilities in 24 countries, more specifically creating isolation services where all those who were infected could be placed in, in, in, in isolated areas so they can be treated around that.

Education was a massive responsibility for us to to look into.

As I mentioned, connectivity was not there in areas where schools were shut down.

In some places schools were converted into isolation centres.

We have to continue with the education of children, especially of The Who would post COVID.

We have fears that they may not be able to return to, to get back to education in these situations, introduce innovative systems through radios, through Internet, through other channels that we could continue education at home with, with, with the children around in, in, in these places.

In terms of jobs and livelihoods, most lost their livelihoods and jobs opportunities.

We have to introduce social safety Nets through cash system.

We'll brief you a little bit on that, but close to 700 million, as you see in the paper that we shared was cash was distributed in, in these areas to provide some social safety Nets.

In terms of support, I would just quickly highlight that we supplied to number of countries all around the world some 380 metric tonnes of PPE and medical equipment.

This was just to reinforce the situation that was in in these isolated areas and that included masks, oxygen concentrators, gowns, ventilators.

These kind of facilities were then provided to those countries.

Mental health and psychosocial support is a massive issue in most of these situations where we are looking at it very carefully because there the support is provided because of the the the stressful situation around that In education, as a highlighted, the assistance was given to 934,000 children in 74 countries that could not cover all of them.

But wherever we could possibly bring assistance, we did that.

But the extent of this, the impact is still coming out.

We have been able to gather data, but still more information is needed.

Some areas we have some information available, working with the World Bank through phone surveys in a number of countries with the joint data centre with the World Bank, UNITR and other partners to get more information about that.

But what we know so far and where we're responding to that, the impact is massive in all these countries.

Andrea, I'll stop here and pass it on to Mary and my colleague.

Thank you.

If Marian's microphone can be unmuted now, good.

Thank you and good morning.

From Geneva.

I think as we just heard is that COVID has had a fast impact on the lives of people.

As mentioned, we've been working very hard on the inclusion of refugees into the National Health response systems both with governments and as well as with our partners.

Like elsewhere, we've unfortunately seen that less people have been able to access healthcare services and I'm talking about a regular healthcare services here.

However, we have seen on a very positive note that in the majority of the refugee camps we have been able to continue all delivery care to women that needed to give birth and we've even in some instances seen an increase in the numbers.

Our programmes have been focusing very much on the COVID prevention measures and at the moment we are working very hard on the access to vaccines.

UNHCR is fully committed to the COVID allocation principles and we continue to advocate for full access to the national vaccine deployment plans on equal power of internationals of the country as well as based on the same criteria that countries have outlined.

We know that currently 106 countries have included refugees and other and internally displaced persons in their plans and that others are still working very hard on the inclusion of these.

We are continuing to work very closely with the COVID partners to ensure that we're able to provide this access, which is an estimated 20% by the end of this year.

We're also aware that in some countries in Europe and the Middle East as well as in Africa, vaccinations have started for refugee health workers.

Lastly, what I would really like to mention here is the great resilience that we have seen of all the health workers out there, including many, many health workers that are refugees.

They have been working very hard to be able to continue health services.

They continue to work very hard.

And in many refugee camps, they have been working better communities to halt the COVID-19 transmission.

And in addition, they've been able to find jobs as well in Europe as in the Americas within the National Health systems.

So I stop here.

Thank you.

Thank you very much, Marian.

We are now opening the 4th look for questions.

We have about some 30 minutes.

I believe.

We have first question coming in from Catherine Fianca.

Bokonga.

Hi, good morning.

Over to you A.

Very good morning to you.

Good morning, Andrei, Julio, Morgan, Mariam.

Good morning, Sajat.

Thank you so much for briefing.

I have a couple questions.

Would it be possible to give us more data about, if you have it, about the limited access for instance?

To water.

In in which camps is it, which regions or how many people are affected?

Also the limited access to all the COVID-19 measures meaning testing, tracing.

Maybe it's easier for to tell you how many camps or facilities are in fact taking advantage of that.

That's a service for the moment.

And I was also interested in the restrictions or difficulties to get PP ES if I noted well, it's 23 countries which regions and about education girls, could you tell us more and also about the massive impact.

I'm sorry to to have all those questions to be addressed to you.

Thank you so much anyway.

Thank you very much, Catherine.

I think we will spread it between Sajad and Marian, perhaps.

Sajad, you will.

You may want to kick off.

I certainly and all very good questions, Catherine.

I think this is what we are struggling with just to make sure that we have the information.

I'll, I'll, I'll go with education first.

I think it's to give you the information that 48% of school age children, refugees were out of school around that.

And a large portion of that was refugee girls in urban areas.

They were going attending national schools or schools of communities around that.

With the shutdown, they were unable to to go back to schools.

But there were some support services are available there that there was Internet in in connectivity in urban areas.

So we managed to bring some support to these and it's in Uganda, Kenya, in countries in Middle East.

We provided the support that children could continue with the education.

The challenge was in camp like situation in rural areas where electricity connectivity is massive.

We look at the camps in Kenya, in Uganda and South Sudan, situation in where in Afghanistan, in Yemen.

These are some of the areas where in in normal circumstances in education is quite hard to bring.

And then this with the COVID spread and connectivity problems we had to use in in Kenya, for example, we used local radio to bring education to these children.

Now the problem is that many of these children will most likely the risk is that we'll not go back to schools because as a result of this one year of, of no education, there's there lots of concerns, especially around girls that early marriages, even in, in in the Middle East, when we hear that they cannot afford to send girls back to school, parents would often tell us that if schools open up, boys perhaps will go back to school and not girls.

And this is something that we're working with communities to make sure that we have children back to to school as quickly as we can with the schools opening up on Ppes and data on water.

I'll pass it on to Marian to give you some details on that.

OK.

Thank you very much.

Can you hear me?

Yes, OK, good.

Thank you.

No, As for the PPEI think you're all very much aware that last year indeed everyone was struggling in the world to access PPES.

We have been able to solve this issue throughout a year.

And at the moment we have sufficient PPE available in all the refugee camps and all our operations to protect both the communities as well as our staff and the staff of our partners.

I think the difficult issue still, but we're struggling with globally at A at another scale as well is the access to COVID testing.

And this continues to be the issue for many healthcare systems as well across the world.

So this is unfortunately no different for UNHCR.

We are actively working with Ministries of health on the procurement of of the COVID testing kits to be able to have a better picture as well of the extent in these sites for water.

We have been able to scale up last year the access to water.

I think in situations where we always had difficulties in accessing water because of the situation that we were facing with an overall lack of water.

This has unfortunately not changed.

But what we have been able to do is working together with national water authorities to provide temporary water trucking to really make sure we were able to build additional water stands in the sites to make sure that it was an increased access to water.

Thank you.

Thank you very much, Marian.

We will be moving on.

The next question we have from Robin Millard from Jean France Press, if Robin's microphone can be opened.

Thank you.

Morning.

Yeah.

Good morning.

Just looking forward to 2021 or the rest of 2020.

One, what is this year ahead of us going to look like for?

Refugees during this.

Pandemic are there are their prospects looking better than last year or are they looking?

Worse and and secondly on.

Their on their place.

In in the vaccine.

Queue.

And the.

Struggle to make sure that they are included in in getting.

Vaccinations in some difficult places.

Thank you.

Thank you, Robin.

I think we'll start with Sajad and then maybe go on COVAX and vaccines to Marion.

So Sajad, maybe?

Yeah.

Thank you very much, Robin.

Good question.

We're looking at so first of all, the whole socio economic impact on on refugees.

It's the same as you can see the nationals.

We're not looking for preferential treatment for refugees.

We're looking as community approach in which refugees aren't included in those in those in those priorities absolutely essential that they're not overlooked.

I think we can say with the with a lot of comfort that in the in preparedness and response of inclusion in preventing the spread of virus, countries did include refugees in their plants.

They knew that if they leave a portion of the community out of that the entire community is at risk.

And we want to continue with a good practise of inclusion.

So inclusion in terms of getting refugees and and populations that are stateless are asylum seekers, even migrants and marginalised populations.

There are a number of communities like this in a country that they included in National Health plans that they included children are included in National Health systems.

So going forward is more towards inclusion that I think we have built enough evidence around that, that inclusion, exclusion has a price to pay.

Inclusion brings benefits to the communities at large.

And looking at 2021, we're looking at working with a lot of governments, development partners, including the World Bank, whose support has been tremendous in this in this in this work.

But a number of donors have also stepped up.

Not just humanitarian assistance was also development assistance to countries hosting refugees.

And that would remain the way forward in looking at 2021.

A lot of recovery work has to go in, the economic work has to to rebuild and most importantly the vaccines, which my colleague Marin can give you a quick update on where we stand on vaccine.

Thank you.

Over to Marian.

Yes, so I think as I mentioned already in my opening remarks, we are working very hard with governments for the equal inclusion of refugees and internally displaced persons as the nationals.

So as we are seeing the vaccine plans being rolled out, we're also seeing that more and more refugees have access to vaccines.

So we're already aware of a number of countries where COVAX has delivered the vaccines that our populations have been included in these.

Of course, we continue to monitor this very, very closely.

And we're monitoring this both at a global level through the COVAX mechanisms as well as the national level with the other UN team members as well as the Ministries of Health.

Thank you.

OK, I believe we have next question coming from Lisa Schlein of the Voice of America.

Lisa, good to hear your voice.

Good this morning.

Now you can hear it.

Good morning, Andre, nice to see you.

I've been wondering where you've been.

OK, I have a few questions here.

The I'm wondering whether you have a figure on the number of refugees and displaced people who actually have been infected with the, with the coronavirus and where in in which countries or regions is the is COVID-19 spreading more widely?

I mean all refugees and.

You know, like in Africa, whatever you have a difference between the developing countries and refugees in the developed countries, I imagine there's a stark difference between them.

Then how, how do you manage to compensate for the lack of social distancing in Cox's Bazaar, for instance?

And people are just crammed in and it seems impossible to to keep them apart.

And then lastly, again, sorry for the, you know, Dilla, you're doing it you with questions, but you seem it, it sounds like there's a lot of harmony between the countries and the refugee populations.

Is that really the case?

Or are tensions between the two populations, the refugees and the host communities actually rising in certain circumstances?

I don't know.

I perhaps I got a skewed view of what you had said.

Thank you.

Thank you very much Lisa.

So we have the issues of the numbers of the infected, the the social distancing and the dynamics of the socio economic impact of the crisis on the relations between refugees and national population.

So maybe first over to Sir Jad and and we may have additional comments from Marian.

Thank you, Lisa.

Thank you for your questions.

Yeah.

This was the big challenge for us in congested locations when social distancing were to be implemented in places like Cox Bazaar, you mentioned, but there were other situations as well where the camps have a certain boundary and within that that we have a very congested population, on average 8 to 10% for shelters.

How do we manage if there is an an infection break out in a situation like Cox Bazaar?

We looked at all this and then they all go for food distribution the same place, they go to the clinics for the same together in the community.

They also go to the water points.

So the challenges were immense to make you know to to keep it, to keep it brief.

So we engage communities in getting that social distancing practises in place, even if the distance in within a household was difficult to to manage.

We we staggered food distribution, we staggered communities attending health clinics, we did more outreach in in communities and spread the message around that engaged them in this holist conversation.

And not just Bazaar itself, the camps Kutupalan, but also around the camp with host communities to make sure that we do not leave out.

The neighbouring communities were also in in most refugee camps, they are in isolated remote areas and dependent on a lot of support from there.

So these challenges by engaging the communities, even though we could not spread the camps, we cannot to stretch the boundaries we managed to, to have that and the infection in the camps.

Looking at the morbidity rates, mortality rates did show that these measures have played a major part in reducing the spread of infections on that very quickly.

A word on cohesion between or coexistence between communities.

I think this pandemic has also there were a few exceptions maybe perhaps in some countries, but generally host communities and refugees because the programmes brought them together, the the prevention, the support brought them together and there were no major problems that we would say that provided as their situation to to deal with.

But generally inclusion now because of refugees assistance is coming to those isolated areas as well.

They see some benefits of that on the figures.

I'll pass it on to Marion.

No, thank you.

So at the moment, we know about 63,000 refugees that have been infected with COVID-19.

The trends that we are seeing is actually the same as we're seeing in the host communities.

So given there's a **** number of people infected in the Americas, we're seeing the same trends.

I think I must put a caveat with the numbers because these are the numbers that are being reported to us and not always Ministry of Health Systems make a difference in the status of a person that is reporting to them.

As as Sajid mentioned already, what we have seen in refugee camps is that cases have not been expensively, extensively ****.

However, we see more trends in urban areas really on power with the with the local communities.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

Obviously there is a very strong case for urgent increase in humanitarian and development funding for the countries, especially low and middle income countries that are hosting 85% of the world's refugees.

Anything short of that obviously will will have long term impact on the situation in those countries and and their stability.

We have further question I believe from Paula Dupras.

Paula, over to you.

Yes, hi, it's for The New Humanitarian.

I wanted to know a little bit more about the issue of education, how you are working with governments and public education authorities on, you know, assuring education for the refugees.

As well as, I don't know if you can talk about, you know, registered, you know, other migrants or as well as informal migrants.

You know, given that there, you know, there's so many demands right now on the governments in terms of expenditures for recovery and so forth.

You know, I'd like to understand a little bit how you are working with these authorities on assuring education for these people, right?

Just to stress that as a refugee agency, obviously we work with people who have fled their homes because of the conflict, war, persecution.

So that's it's clearly the, the remit of the of the of the organisation Sajjad Marian.

And he wants to take this first, maybe go for Sajjad.

First, yeah, I I can go focusing on refugees.

So this was quite a major challenge for us to see how we're going to continue bringing education to children.

So we did with the Malala Fund.

You'd looked at the the situation where we could, we found out that at 50% of refugee girls enrolled in secondary education were at risk of dropping out.

And that's a very small number of secondary education children that go to go to school, refugee, refugee children, secondary education at the primary level that the situation was even more difficult in, in a number of areas.

We looked at the schools as as mentioned earlier, connectivity areas in, in, in remote areas where teachers could not reach out to school.

So all these areas were looked into and we worked very closely.

Some of the schools that we work there in refugee camps and in refugee settlements and they're engaged communities to make sure that education continues at some level.

We work closely with UNICEF, UNESCO, with the Education Cannot Wait.

We have very close contacts with with host communities, local governments, ministries of education.

The support from the World Bank is is coming through in a number of areas, for example, supporting these governments.

We're trying to make a number of private sectors engaged and involved in in, in bringing in resources, some technology to to those areas to make sure that we continue providing education to this.

It's still a very small number that accessed these tools compared to the overall population.

But even even with these difficulties, we were managed to assist some 934,000 students in 74 countries in in different situations like this.

The other question, I'll pass it on to Mary.

Was there any other question or was it the only education?

That was the only education one.

Sorry.

Back to you, Andrew.

OK.

Thank you very much.

I don't see any other hands raised.

It is now 11 AM just wondering whether I see Lisa has a follow up question.

Lisa over to you.

I do yes.

I forgot to ask a question before and I have one additional 1.

And that is how much money have you actually spent on this operation and how much money do you need?

You always need money.

You're always pleading for money.

And then I, as I recall earlier on in the pandemic, you, your level of concern about your ability to tackle this issue in the for refugees was extremely ****.

You seem to be not complacent, but a little bit ensured that maybe you're able to actually get a handle on this.

Is this correct?

I mean, do you going forward, do you feel somewhat better about your ability to actually keep down the level of infections and deaths from COVID-19?

Thank you.

Thank you, Lisa.

Very important questions.

And I think so Judd will speak about the global needs.

In terms of the response, yeah, no.

Alicia, I think this is a very, very valid and strong questions.

When looking at February last year when the whole pandemic was was spreading, we were extremely, extremely concerned about if they spread the way that the the news were coming out of a number of countries in Europe or China.

And if we were thinking of camps like Qutupurlong in, in Cox Bazaar or Deep Africa or the, the situation in Afghanistan or Yemen, Libya.

And we were looking at these situations and say if this virus infection spread in those areas could be devastating for the population in industries.

We went through data what was available with us.

We engage universities to do some modelling of, of spread of virus.

We use that data to to introduce our preparedness and response, social distancing, additional water, bringing in support in terms of PPES and supporting remote hospitals and governments working with them, creating isolation walls.

We ran against time in that markets were tight, we could not get PPES.

We worked around the clock to work with our WHO partners.

Preposition stockpiles in different countries worked around the clock to be ahead of the curve because it was spreading in those areas gradually over a period of time as the virus spreads.

There were many reasons, science will tell us later what exactly happened, but eventually we see that the spread of virus in those countries because of the introduction of this preventative measures, the spread was contained in a number of these situations.

Thanks to the governments, thanks to the communities, the support that we had from different partners, it was in a way it's still we.

We had losses amongst our colleagues, UACR staff, frontline workers.

We lost recently lost another one who was attending to an emergency in Sudan who had travelled from another country to be part of the emergency mission.

We have colleagues who went through this and we had lost refugees and we have lost others.

So we are not going to be complacent at all.

We're going to work ahead of the curve just to make sure that these communities get what they need.

Now the struggle is for the vaccines.

So there is now inclusion of vaccines, as Marin explained that it's absolutely essential that we get this going.

Now 106 countries have shown in their plans that they are going to include refugees, asylum seekers and the others in their in their plans.

But then we also want to see that when global equity, it's there that the vaccines reach these low income countries, middle income countries, absolutely essential.

Then one is reaches the countries that refugee populations are also included in vaccines.

Beautiful, beautiful examples.

Emerging from Rwanda, for example, 418 refugees were vaccinated, a small number.

But these poor countries are sharing these resources and we are not asking for preferential treatment for refugees.

We wanted to make sure that the health workers within the community of refugees, they are also part of the frontline who can be vaccinated.

Refugees have come back, they have want to pay back to the communities they have joined, where they have medical expertise, doctors, nurses trained, they have joined national societies to, to to support them.

So I think that work will continue.

Our focus now is that we want to make sure that one they included in the vaccine programmes and 2nd the socio economic in recovery, that inclusion part which I mentioned earlier on health and education on jobs that these people have access to.

Now in terms of our resources.

So we have provided that one pager and it has, it has we we look for funds.

Definitely without these contributions we would not be able to do the work that we are able to do throughout the world.

We, our appeal is there.

We did in the global humanitarian response plan included last year all the needs that were there.

So we got very generous support from donors.

492 million was raised in 2020, which was the resource that we placed in, in, in, in these operations to prevent the spread of disease and control what was required to do.

Now we're looking at resources this year.

Again, there's our regular appeal, but there's also a supplementary appeal that we have floated and there we're looking at, you know, further 4.

[Missing Subtitle]

1,000,450 Thanks Andrew.

So those it has to look at further introducing prevention, if there's further spread that we were able to contain that education is important, livelihoods is important.

And we make sure that these refugees continue to enjoy at least the basic rights that are there for them, which is important that they are supported in that.

And your message through you would be absolutely ascension for us to bring it to the people that this support needs to continue.

The struggle is still going on with this pandemic and we're not there.

Vaccination will be slow process.

2022 is the beginning.

2021 is the beginning.

But it may very much go into 2022 and beyond because the vaccine is trickling down very slowly to this country.

Andrea, thank you.

Thank you, colleagues, for all this, your support.

Back to you, Andrea.

Thank you very much.

Just to stress that UNHCR has mainstreamed all of its COVID activities in the global appeal for 20/21.

However, in late December, we have also released the the supplementary COVID appeal, which is essentially looking at the exceptional socio economic and protection impacts that that the pandemic has brought.

And therefore there was that supplementary appeal also put out in December, 18th of December last year.

I believe we have no further questions.

I don't see any other hands raised.

Are there any last comments from our speakers?

If not, then I would like to thank all of the members of the press corps who have attended today for your time and for your support.

I would also like to thank our speakers.

Most of all, I would like to thank the colleagues from the UNTV who have been so kind in facilitating this press conference today.

Today.

Thank you again and stay safe and stay well.

Take care.

Bye bye.

UNHCR Press conference - A year of COVID-19 pandemic - impact on world's refugees 18 March 2021