What Is RI?
Founded in 1979, Refugees International (RI) is an independent, non-profit advocacy organization serving refugees, displaced persons, and vulnerable populations around the world. We are currently focusing on helping refugee populations in Africa, although we also operate in Southeast Asia, Central Asia and Europe. Our work is designed to generate responses to meet the basic needs of refugees, including food, medicine, shelter, and safety.

What Does RI Do?
RI gathers information about an emergency by conducting humanitarian assessment missions to crisis areas throughout Africa, Asia and Eastern Europe. From the office in DC, RI then advocates concrete solutions through op-eds, media appearances, testimony at Congressional hearings, and direct contact with top government and UN officials.

RI presses for a wide range of responses by governments and aid agencies such as: aircraft to speed food deliveries, water purification equipment to ward off cholera, water pumps and irrigation for refugees returning to their farms, human rights monitors to deter violence against civilians, and international military support to protect relief operations.

While RI primarily focuses on refugees and internally displaced persons (there are 30 million uprooted worldwide), the organization’s broad mandate covers any crisis where victims are in grave danger. We thus work also with people still in their homes but buffeted by insecurity and war, as well as returned refugees who have been left stranded after repatriation.

RI has a proud record of success in catalyzing lifesaving action by the U.S. and UN. In the 1990s we moved beyond our early emphasis on Indochinese refugees to play a key role in galvanizing the international response to humanitarian crisis in Kurdish Iraq, Bosnia, Rwanda, and Sierra Leone. Most recently, RI was first on the ground to discover a massive aid shortage for displaced Eritreans, to document the plight of refugees in Guinea and displaced persons in Afghanistan, and to advise top policy makers on actions needed to save lives in war-torn Congo.

How is RI Different?
RI has the independence to speak frankly and directly about what is not being done for refugees because it does not take grants from governments or the UN. RI does not have any political affiliations.

RI is careful not to duplicate the efforts of others; we look for neglected people and problems. There is a multiplier effect to supporting RI; our advocacy leverages significant actions, often involving major resources.

By going out to see the situation first-hand and talking to the refugees themselves, and then drawing on long experience as to how the international aid system works, RI can often make a life-saving difference for people who are in truly desperate straits. The most vulnerable of these are almost always women and children.