I will draw largely on personal experience, particularly from my research work in Zambia and also experience as a practitioner working as a consultant and as NGO staff member. Although the range of examples here may be limited, I have heard similar stories from others and believe that the issues will resonate with those who have experience in other areas. The purpose here is to raise questions about current practice and to illustrate how universal assumptions about refugees can lead to undesirable results in particular circumstances. Although the tenor of the paper may be critical, it is offered on the basis of my own involvement in humanitarian programmes with refugees and in full recognition of the dilemmas they throw up. In the main body of the paper, I discuss a number of areas in which UNHCR's dual mandate for providing refugee protection and humanitarian aid can contradict each other. I start by looking at the problems of marking out the refugees and then targeting aid towards them, particularly when refugees are being assisted by local hosts outside refugee camps. This process tends to cast refugees as the problem to be solved rather than the war and may also result in relief programmes which may undermine development initiatives. I then turn to consider how the priorities of humanitarian aid may create direct clashes with protection aims, especially during registration and where refugees suffer abuses in camps funded by UNHCR. In conclusion I tentatively suggest a way that some of these problems may be avoided by differentiating more sharply between UNHCR's protection and aid roles.

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Africa aid policy refugee humanitarian aid