Refugees. What new approaches and solutions exist for rebuilding the shattered lives of millions of the displaced? Could refugee cities replace refugee camps and offer a superior model.
Today, the world is spending billions of dollars each year in dead-end, protracted refugee management with camps and urban settings that maintain precarious conditions and no perspectives for its inhabitants. This puts great strain on hosting communities and often creates negative reactions.
All this leads to desperation, criminality, and in some cases breeding terrorism. No one chooses to be a refugee and live, 17 years, on average, in a refugee camp without a future. We need to see not as a burden, but simply people who were forced to flee their homes. People who are highly motivated to reconstruct their lives and their communities, and motivated to work, contribute and to build a future for themselves and their children.
Refugees and other migrants forced to leave their homelands managed to succeed in countries like the United States which they helped become the most successful nation in the world.
What we need is a safe harbor, a new place where refugees and other migrants forced to leave their homes receive the opportunity to live, work, study, create, start businesses, build new lives for themselves and their families.
Andan Foundation, a Swiss based nonprofit has been working to completely upend and reform how we deal with the growing global refugee crisis. Over the past 3 years developed Global Cities – autonomous, self-governed subnational entities that provide a safe environment, rule of law, and that will create wealth and prosperity for its citizens as well as for the nations hosting them.
Andan has already established the key parameters, legal and economic ramifications and is now engaged with several governments and major investors who are prepared to finance the establishment of the first Global City, which will also provide a decent return on the capital from private investors.
Altru Institute will host a session Monday May 23rd in Davos Switzerland to examine this idea. The management of Andan will present its plans to provide such to a select group of investors and political leaders.
Engage in a conversation as to the specifics of how such a Refugee City would function. The focus will be on the specific execution of their model.
· An overview of the overall strategy and the key players that are seeing this opportunity.
· Critical elements.
· Financial investment required.
· The political challenges.
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