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Living amid chronic violence and insecurity, tens of thousands of people from Honduras and El Salvador have been forced to flee their homes in recent years.
© UNHCR/Diana Diaz
Launched by the High Commissioner for Refugees, Filippo Grandi, during the first Global Refugee Forum (December 2019) in Geneva, Switzerland, the MIRPS Support Platform is a mechanism to support responsibility-sharing on forced displacement in Central America and Mexico. It was set up to support the efforts of the seven MIRPS countries to offer protection, seek solutions and to mobilize support from other conventional and unconventional players in these efforts.
The MIRPS Support Platform is also supported by the Organization of American States (OAS) and UNHCR. In June 2020, the Government of Spain assumed the leadership of the MIRPS Support Platform as Chair for a period of one year. Having facilitated the adoption of a governance structure for the Platform, Spain will now provide leadership for the implementation of a workplan. The platform will seek to channel the support required by MIRPS countries to respond to the needs of over 890,000 people forced to flee from the northern Central America and Nicaragua.
Borne from the experience of the Friends of MIRPS Group, the Support Platform is currently composed by Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, the European Union, France, Spain, Switzerland, Uruguay and the United States of America.
How can Platform members support the MIRPS:
- Provide technical support in one or more focus areas: Education, Jobs & Livelihoods, Strengthening the asylum system, Child protection, etc. based on the MIRPS national action plans.
- Analyze whether pledges made at the Global Refugee Forum can support the MIRPS.
- Provide financial support to MIRPS countries to cover financial gaps of the MIRPS national action plans.
- Help bring additional actors into the response through the Platform to broaden the support base.
- Become a MIRPS Ambassador and facilitate engagement with development actors.
- Map private sector actors within your country that can be engaged in supporting the MIRPS.
- Support the Cities of Solidarity initiative in the MIRPS Countries through twinning or ways of support to municipalities.
- Increase the number of resettlement places and complementary pathways such as education and private sponsorship programmes for asylum seekers and refugees from Central America.
Learn more about the MIRPS Support Platform here.
MIRPS FUND
The MIRPS FUND is the specific Fund for voluntary contributions to the Regional Comprehensive Framework for Protection and Solutions to Forced Displacement in Central America and Mexico called the MIRPS FUND, unanimously approved by the Permanent Council of the OAS on May 27, 2020. The approval of this fund fulfills a mandate given to the OAS General Secretariat by the highest political body of the Organization during the OAS General Assembly held in 2019 in the city of Medellin, Colombia.
The MIRPS FUND is one of the mechanisms for collecting and channeling financial resources through voluntary contributions to allow the 7 MIRPS countries to comply with the commitments under this framework and address the challenges posed by forced displacement in this region, in order to protect and improve the living conditions of people who have been forcibly displaced and their host communities. But also in light of the additional challenges intensified by the COVID-19 pandemic, which will require additional investments and efforts to address the needs of refugees, asylum seekers, internally displaced persons and returnees in need of international protection in this region.
Learn more about the MIRPS Fund here.
See also: Instructions to send wire transfers of MIRPS contributions to OAS General Secretariat.
