WHAT THE FUTURE HOLDS “ Our recommendation is to expand the consortium and encourage as much engagement between partners as possible. We are far stronger together”. CESF Consortium Member BUILDING AND EXPANDING ON THE WORK OF THE CONSORTIUM COVID-19 clearly illustrated how structural discrimination and marginalisation of stateless people results in significant real-life consequences on equality, dignity and rights. In turn, the CESF highlighted the potential impact that creative and collaborative community-centring models can have on humanitarian and structural challenges. As such there is both the need and potential to build on the CESF to address broader underlying factors leading to statelessness and the associated human rights violations affecting stateless people. The CESF Independent Evaluation Report identified the benefits, impact, and replicability of the CESF and provided recommendations on how to strengthen the model for use in future emergency and non-emergency contexts. The evaluation found the innovative model to be applicable to other human rights contexts, notably the consortium’s approach to partnership, its collaborative peer structure, and its responsive flexible modality. These combined elements allowed both local-level development and adaptation of programmatic work as required, while creating a supportive overarching framework based on peer-to-peer learning and knowledge exchange. The Roadmap for Change developed through the CESF is reflective of the approach taken by the CESF in centring and being accountable to stateless people while connecting across borders to strengthen solidarity, visibility and impact. The structural-humanitarian coordinated approach, which linked direct service provision and support to advocacy strategies and interventions, was found to be a basis for greater intersection and partnership between human rights and humanitarian actors. There is considerable potential to expand this work further, particularly in relation to an issue such as statelessness, where structural discrimination underpins socio-economic and political exclusion, this dual approach was seen as both ground-breaking and necessary. The evaluation also outlined that from a donor-perspective the CESF could inform funding models which ensure local creative autonomy to develop and respond programmatically, as well as strong accountability, transparency and learning, while reducing overly onerous structures. Given the success of the CESF as a time-bound emergency response with only limited funding (500,000 EUR total expenditure), there is much that can be drawn from this experience to inform longer-term or larger-scale pooled funding or consortium models that pursue structural change on statelessness and the right to a nationality – or indeed on other pressing human rights issues. Protecting the right to a nationality and the human rights of stateless people is becoming an ever-greater challenge, in the face of increased authoritarianism, growth of the security state and populism, xenophobia and racism. And with discrimination being the most significant driver of statelessness, precipitating the exclusion of minority groups from citizenship all around the world, there is a need for greater coordinated and collaborative efforts to address this. While there are important grassroots-level initiatives ongoing in several countries to address systemic discrimination as a cause (and consequence) of statelessness, there is a lack of resourcing and opportunities for peer learning and joined-up engagement to distil promising practices that could inform the wider statelessness field, and to advocate for structural change. Building on the success and lessons learned from the CESF to shape longer-term initiatives could be highly impactful. For example, a global consortium on statelessness and discrimination could be established, linking up and directing resourcing towards NGOs and citizenship rights activists at the frontline of the struggle against systemic discrimination so that they can work both locally and together to challenge exclusion and promote social justice for stateless people and those at risk of statelessness. Donors, UN bodies, NGOs and activists are encouraged to engage with and support conversations to establish such longer-term initiatives. PRIORITIES FOR THE FUTURE Given the time-bound, emergency response nature of the CESF, Consortium members focused primarily on the structural barriers to inclusion that manifested in the context of the pandemic, with life-threatening consequences. While several of the issues taken forward by Consortium members were continuations of their pre-pandemic work (adapted to the COVID-19 emergency context), some groups had to deprioritise their existing programming to make room for their emergency response. In order to understand what types of issues they would like to prioritise – not in an emergency context but for the long-term – as the CESF came towards its conclusion, Consortium members were asked where there is the greatest need with regards to the long-standing and ongoing impacts of structural discrimination faced by their communities. Through a short survey that presented eleven thematic areas for consideration, work to address documentation problems came out as the highest priority. This reflects the clear nexus between (lack of) citizenship, (lack of) access to documents and (lack of) enjoyment of other rights and services, that was visible across the experiences of the CESF consortium projects. The following order of prioritisation emerged in terms of other issue areas for future work: 34