When Home Is No Longer Safe: On World Refugee Day and the Work of Building Back

Every year on 20 June, the world marks World Refugee Day, a moment designated by the United Nations to acknowledge the courage, resilience, and contributions of millions of people who have been forced from their homes. This year, that acknowledgment carries particular weight. Across Africa and the Middle East, displacement is not a footnote to geopolitical events. It is the lived reality of tens of millions of people, many of them children, navigating survival in conditions that the rest of the world rarely has to imagine.

The numbers are staggering. Africa hosts some of the largest refugee populations on the planet, with the Democratic Republic of Congo, South Sudan, Somalia, and Sudan among the leading sources of displacement. The Great Lakes region alone, encompassing the DRC, Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda, and Tanzania, has experienced decades of conflict-driven movement, producing wave after wave of internally displaced persons and cross-border refugees. In the Middle East, the fallout from the wars in Syria, Yemen, and Palestine has left millions without stable shelter, livelihoods, or legal status. For these populations, World Refugee Day is not an occasion for reflection alone. It is a reminder of what has been lost and what remains to be done.

What that work looks like on the ground is rarely captured fully in policy documents or international frameworks. It is better understood through the people who are building responses to displacement from within the communities most affected. Abraham Kahasha Kabral is one of those people.

Abraham grew up in Goma, in the eastern DRC, and experienced internal displacement as a child. That experience did not leave him. It became the driving force behind two organisations he founded: the Refugee Bank for Africa (RBAf) and The World and Peoples Transform in Transformation (WOPT). Together, these initiatives represent something rarely seen in humanitarian response: a comprehensive, community-rooted effort to address not just the immediate needs of refugees, but the structural conditions that keep them locked in dependence.

The Refugee Bank for Africa (RBAf), which Abraham describes as the first humanitarian bank of its kind on the continent, offers interest-free, non-repayable loans to refugees and internally displaced persons. The concept reframes the refugee not as a passive recipient of aid, but as someone capable of managing resources and building toward financial independence, if given access. RBAf has reached 400 refugees through various initiatives, distributing the Refugee Action Handbook to help young people navigate educational opportunities, supplying basic education kits to children, and providing 105 families with access to clean water, food, and clothing. The goal, always, is dignity through practical support rather than charity as an end in itself.

Through WOPT, Abraham's focus expands to the architecture of peace. One of the organisation's recent programmes, Voices of Peace and Justice, amplifies the perspectives of 33 marginalised individuals drawn from refugee, IDP, and host communities in the North and South Kivu provinces of the DRC. The programme is grounded in a simple but powerful insight: that those most affected by conflict are also among the most capable of speaking to what peace requires. The programme puts their voices into dialogue rather than leaving them on the margins of decisions that shape their lives.

Perhaps most forward-looking is the Peace Booster Great Lakes project, a youth-driven digital platform that converts smartphones into tools for conflict prevention and community building across the five-country Great Lakes region. In an environment where young people are often recruited into violence or left without direction, the platform offers another path: practical knowledge for preventing conflict, building cross-border networks, and strengthening resilience. Abraham is expanding the platform to include Kenya and South Sudan, and is integrating artificial intelligence to advance women's and girls' participation in the peace process.

" "World Refugee Day is personal for me. I was that child who was displaced, who did not know what tomorrow looked like. Today, when I stand with refugees in the camps of eastern Congo, I am not looking at strangers. I am looking at a version of myself that was given a second chance. This day is not about pity. It is about recognising that behind every statistic is a person with capacity, with dreams, and with the right to a dignified life. That is what drives everything we do at the Refugee Bank for Africa." — — Abraham Kahasha Kabral, YELP Fellow 2022, Founder, Refugee Bank for Africa (RBAf)

Abraham is a fellow of the LéO Africa Institute, part of a network of African leaders who are not waiting for external solutions to African challenges. His work is recognised internationally, having taken him to the EU Visitors Programme in Brussels, where he participated in policy dialogues on democracy, migration, and climate. He has worked as a Regional Project Assistant and Security Officer on a European Union-supported Great Lakes youth dialogue programme, and has engaged with multiple peace frameworks shaping the DRC, including the Doha talks, the Nairobi and Luanda Agreements, and African Union mediation processes. Most recently, Abraham has been selected to serve on the 2026 to 2028 cohort of the UNHCR Global Advisory Board of Organisations Led by Forcibly Displaced and Stateless Persons, representing both RBAf and WOPT. In this role, he will contribute directly to shaping UNHCR policy on refugee protection and inclusion, bringing the perspective of someone who has lived displacement and spent years building responses to it from the ground up.

But the most important rooms he works in are not in Brussels or Geneva or Addis Ababa. They are in displacement camps, community halls, and the informal spaces where people are trying to figure out how to stay alive and stay together.

World Refugee Day calls for awareness. But what follows awareness must be more than empathy at a distance. It requires sustained attention to the systems that produce and prolong displacement, and to the people building alternatives from the inside. Abraham Kahasha Kabral's work shows what that looks like: patient, multi-pronged, deeply local, and long-term. RBAf is not a one-time intervention. WOPT is not a pilot project. These are institutions in the making, built on the conviction that refugees are not a problem to be managed but people with the capacity to shape their own futures, given the right conditions.

On World Refugee Day, that conviction is worth more than a moment of recognition. It is worth building around.

To learn more about Abraham's work or to connect with him and the Refugee Bank for Africa, follow and reach out on the platforms below.

X: @AbrahamKahasha | @RBAf_

Instagram: @AbrahamKahasha | @RefugeeBankAfrica

LinkedIn: Abraham Kahasha Kabral | The Refugee Bank for Africa (RBAf)