Addis Abeba — The United International locations refugee agency (UNHCR) has warned that entirely 12 percent of the 576,000 refugee teenagers in Ethiopia had been registered in the country’s a should always safe registration system, leaving the majority exposed to “severe protection risks and potential statelessness.”
“The lack of proper documentation severely limits access to essential services and legal protection for these vulnerable children,” UNHCR mentioned in its most authorized situational file, noting that the majority of refugee teenagers remain unregistered as of August 2024.
According to the agency, resource constraints, inadequate infrastructure, and ongoing security challenges in the Oromia, Tigray, and Amhara regions safe significantly hindered registration efforts. The COVID-19 pandemic further sophisticated the technique by creating backlogs in registration.
Even supposing Ethiopia has established accurate frameworks by plot of the 2017 Major Occasions Registration Proclamation and the 2019 Refugee Proclamation to be certain that that equal treatment in registration processes, implementation remains restricted, particularly in the Afar and Assosa regions, UNHCR well-known.
To take care of these challenges, the Ethiopian executive, by plot of its Refugees and Returnees Service (RRS), beforehand announced an initiative to integrate refugees and asylum seekers into the nationwide digital ID system.
The program involves issuing digital refugee ID cards with a different “Fayda” identification number offered by the Nationwide ID Program (NIDP). Using biometric technology, the Fayda number targets to forestall double registration and reproduction ID issuance.
Ethiopia in the intervening time hosts bigger than a million refugees and asylum seekers, including 60,688 recent arrivals fleeing the war in Sudan since April 2023. The country can also be managing 4.4 million internally displaced individuals, according to information from the International Organization for Migration (IOM) as of February 2024.
