Although the urban refugee population has been relatively small, comprising of 262 refugees from various nationalities, the protection challenges and vulnerabilities remain complex requiring continuous counselling and assessment of needs. The refugees are highly affected by the lack of identity documents, and limited access to livelihoods resulting in the majority to be dependent on humanitarian assistance.
The government agreed to admit urban refugee children into Tanzanian schools to enable them to continue their education, but the language of tuition and concerns about quality have meant that only some are benefiting from this. At the same time, refugees living in urban setting are not able to obtain work permits despite the provision of the ‘right to work’ under refugee law, making access to the formal job market and self-sufficiency impossible. Multi-purpose assistance to extremely vulnerable individuals will be prioritized and prevention of gender-based violence will be mainstreamed throughout the response. Targeted assistance to extremely vulnerable individuals will remain to be prioritized. UNHCR will further ensure strengthening of the response to gender-based violence an ensure participation of the refugee community in gender-based violence prevention and response through awareness-raising campaigns.
In addition to the direct assistance and response to the protection challenges of the urban refugees, operation-wide protection challenges such as refugee status determination, advocacy and broader stakeholder engagement, registration data management and transition to the Government, interventions to minimize risk of stateless, etc. will be addressed. In 2021, UNHCR will continue to improve refugee registration data management together with the refugee status determination, including engagements on issuance of national ID cards to urban refugees.
Despite pledging, during the 2011 inter-governmental ministerial meeting to mark the 60th Anniversary of the 1951 Convention and the 50th Anniversary of the 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness, and at the April 2019 Ministerial Conference on Statelessness in Nairobi, as well as during the High Level Segment (HLS) on Statelessness in Geneva in October 2019, to ratify and domesticate the international instruments on statelessness, this has not yet been achieved. In 2021, efforts will focus on ensuring a sustained and increased engagement on issues of statelessness in Tanzania with the Government and other stakeholders, with the possible accession of the two Statelessness Conventions by 2021.