With You Newsletter 2021 Issue 1: Message from Acting Representative in China

In 2021, UNHCR faces new and more complex situations. Our work is needed now, more than ever.

• Surging numbers of forcibly displaced:
Seven decades since the formation of UNHCR, the number of forcibly displaced people has now surpassed 80 million.

• New displacements in multiple regions:
Violence in Syria, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Mozambique, Somalia, and Yemen drove new displacements in the first half of 2020. Significant new displacements were also registered across Africa’s Central Sahel region.

• The prevailing COVID-19 pandemic:
As an emergency on top of an emergency for those displaced, the pandemic’s impact on refugees’ precarious existence - and on their hosts - has been devastating. The virus has disrupted every aspect of human life and severely worsened existing challenges for stateless and forcibly displaced people. Many of them live in poverty.

Despite all these challenges, we are constantly inspired by how so many individuals showed their kindness, compassion and solidarity. We wish to thank our supporters for staying with refugees during this most difficult year and our colleagues and partners who, far from their home and families, have been working tirelessly to protect refugees. We also salute the resilience of the refugees we serve all over the world; they too contributed what they could to fight the pandemic.

Times have changed, but our mission hasn’t. Today, thanks to the generosity of people like you, we remain more committed than ever to helping refugees thrive, not just survive.

Vivian Tan
UNHCR Acting Representative in China