ADDIS ABABA, Nov. 12 (Xinhua) -- The United Nations International Organization for Migration (IOM) on Tuesday disclosed new community-based initiative for displacement affected people in Ethiopia's southeastern Somali regional state.
"Humanitarian partners, including IOM, are now scaling up use of the Community-Based Planning approach to support the Ethiopian government's return initiative, and to strengthen sustainable return, recovery, and social integration," IOM said in a statement issued on Tuesday.
The move came after the East African country recorded some 3.04 million Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) by March 2019 due to ethnic conflict and environmental shocks over the past year, according to figures from IOM's Displacement Tracking Matrix (DTM).
The Ethiopian government, since April 2019, has been engaged through a phased plan that envisaged to return, relocate and integrate those displaced, resulting in tens of thousands of IDPs returning to their places of origin.
According to the UN migration agency, the approach "encourages communities to form community-based structures that assist in identifying and prioritizing their emergency and recovery needs."
The approach also "helps displacement affected and host communities, returnees, and other migrant groups to build social cohesion and peaceful coexistence," IOM said in a statement issued on Tuesday.
The UN migration agency also emphasized the crucial importance of establishing core facilitation teams formed by people with demonstrable technical capacity to roll out the community-based planning process in districts with a high number of communities affected by displacement.
It also stressed that the community-based planning approach "empowers communities, including vulnerable socio-economic groups such as IDPs, to demand and actively participate in development interventions that are relevant to them."
"This inclusive approach is expected to empower communities to come up with a shared vision for sustainable development. The vision, in turn, generates goals, strategies and projects with clearly defined action plans for implementation," the statement read.
