AHMR African Human Mobility Review - Volume 11 No 2, MAY-AUGUST 2025
Strengthened or Sidelined?
An Evaluation of Pledges to
Eradicate Statelessness in the
Southern African Development
Community
Sky Kruger1 and Shazia Sader2
Received 20 March 2025 / Accepted 18 July 2025 / Published 27 August 2025
DOI: 10.14426/ahmr.v11i2.2765
Abstract
Since 2018, there has been a significant mobilization of developmental funding
mechanisms and efforts to facilitate greater burden-sharing among refugee-hosting
states and address protracted displacement. The Global Compact on Refugees (GCR) of
2018, seeks to harness this developmental approach – in particular, multi-stakeholder
participation and a system of pledge-making – for the benefit of refugees and the
communities that host them. Multi-stakeholder participation and pledge-making are
common tools of a developmental approach to forced displacement more broadly,
as well as statelessness, with the pledging system aiming to galvanize cross-sectoral
collaboration, facilitate more predictable funding and provide a mechanism for the
tracking of progress. Yet this system is still nascent and it remains unclear whether
the long-term progress its enabling framework envisions is currently unfolding. This
paper assesses whether the pledging system, as an operationalizing mechanism of the
GCR and its framework, has contributed toward the efforts to eradicate statelessness
in the Southern African Development Community (SADC). Statelessness in the SADC
– as is the case globally – remains a significant issue and an obstacle to accessing basic
services and rights. The true scale of statelessness has consistently been difficult to
gauge due to the lack of data collection on statelessness by most countries. While states
in the region have taken steps to eradicate statelessness, the role that the pledging
system plays in this endeavor has received little attention. The pledging system may
be able to facilitate multi-stakeholder participation where there is already an impetus,
but it is unclear whether it can address the systemic issues, such as discrimination,
that underpin statelessness. Further, the pledging system is still in the early stages of
configuring measures for transparency and accountability.
Keywords: statelessness, Global Compact on Refugees, burden-sharing,
Southern Africa
1
Research Assistant, Refugee Rights Unit, University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa.
Corresponding author. sky.kruger@uct.ac.za
2
Supervising Attorney, Refugee Rights Unit, University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa.
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