This chapter reviews our basic claim: refugee-led organisations exist, and they deserve recognition for the important roles they play. We draw out comparative analysis of RCOs based on nationality and leadership and the political economy in which they partake, and discuss practical and theoretical implications. Many RCOs offer social protection to refugees and fill gaps left by national or international providers in areas as diverse as education, vocational training, psychosocial support, health, microfinance, sport, youth engagement and legal representation. They vary in scale, focus and capacity, demonstrating the many ways in which refugees mobilise to support vulnerable members of the community. They are providing protection and assistance – the very services normally associated exclusively with international aid agencies and NGOs. For many refugees, especially those in cities, such sources of community support are perceived as more relevant to their lives than those provided by large-scale aid organisations. Yet refugee-led organisations rarely receive recognition or funding from the international humanitarian system. A deeper understanding of how they have and can contribute to refugee aid and development can act as a crucial next step to begin restructuring the architecture of assistance.

This chapter introduces the key ideas and questions that inform this work, as well as the overall structure of the subsequent chapters. Across the low- and middle-income countries that host 85 per cent of the world’s refugees, protection and assistance is provided to refugees by United Nations organisations in collaboration with a network of NGO ‘implementing partners’. The dominant humanitarian model is usually premised upon a provider-beneficiary relationship: international organisations are the protectors and refugees are the protected. In parallel to this model, however, is a largely neglected story: refugees themselves frequently mobilise to create community-based organisations or informal networks as alternative providers of social protection. They mobilise bottom-up to provide sources of assistance to other refugees in areas as diverse as education, health, livelihoods, finance and housing. Despite their importance to refugees, however, for a number of reasons introduced in this chapter, refugee-led organisations (sometimes referred to as refugee community organisations, or RCOs) generally receive little international recognition or support.