CARE Canada is honoured to contribute to the committee's deliberations today.
CARE is a rights-based international NGO. We support life-saving humanitarian assistance and peace-building, as well as longer-term development work with a specific focus on women and girls. Last year, our work reached nearly 60 million people in 95 countries, including in refugee-hosting countries such as Jordan, Bangladesh and Kenya.
1 will begin by sharing an example of the way we work with refugees and host communities in such contexts. My colleague will then provide our perspectives on the global compact on refugees.
CARE has been in Jordan since 1949. ln recent years, Jordan has absorbed almost 700,000 Syrian refugees, over 85% of whom live below the poverty line. This has placed significant strain on government services and on the communities where the refugees are trying to eke out a new living. We have set up four urban refugee hubs across Jordan. These are essentially community centres, like you would find in any city in Canada, with children singing off-key and a flurry of activity. The urban refugee hubs are innovative in that they provide services and assistance to refugees and vulnerable Jordanians alike through immediate cash assistance, psychosocial support and skills training.
This accomplishes a number of things. First, it helps supplement services provided by the Jordanian government. Second, the hubs relieve pressure on the current humanitarian system by building women and men's capacities to generate income and become self-reliant. Third, the hubs foster social cohesion, providing services that otherwise would not be available to the local Jordanian population. Finally, urban refugee hubs provide a safe space for refugees to speak to other refugees, to share their experiences and to recover a sense of normalcy and dignity.
As you will have seen in Uganda, amazing things happen when we help refugees help themselves. Our most recent annual assessment noted that refugees in Jordan are becoming more self-sufficient and less reliant on aid. ln an era of unprecedented humanitarian need, more protracted conflicts, and increasingly scarce resources, solutions like these help us stretch our aid dollars and foster longer-term, more sustainable impacts.