AHMR African Human Mobility Review - Volume 11 No 2, MAY-AUGUST 2025 nonetheless been accompanied by the system of pledge-making and monitoring that the GCR’s framework uses. Part II provides an overview and analysis of the situation of statelessness in the SADC region, providing a discussion of the regional frameworks that aim to address statelessness. There are several systemic issues that cause and exacerbate statelessness, such as gender discrimination, that the pledging system has to contend with. The focus of Part III is on examining the steps taken toward addressing statelessness in the SADC region. Part III shows that the pledging system has contributed to several measures taken to end statelessness, although there are still issues with low implementation and a lack of multi-stakeholder effort. It is also argued that, while the pledges play a role in sustaining momentum and providing an opportunity for review, they are often hamstrung by the slow processes of legislative reform, accession to binding instruments, and nationwide documentation drives. METHODOLOGY This paper is based on a literature review of the existing publications on the GCR and the development turn in forced displacement responses. It engages with existing literature on statelessness in the SADC region. The paper contributes to an understanding of the interactions between the Global Compact and developmental funding, on the one hand and statelessness in the Southern African region, on the other. Central to this is an analysis of the pledging system, which is currently not well traversed in the literature. This paper engages with reports and articles that describe the early steps taken to address statelessness to understand what role, if any, the pledging system plays in the region. Measuring the material impacts of developmental funding and the pledges requires long-term systemic analysis, which is not undertaken by this paper. PART I THE GLOBAL COMPACT ON REFUGEES, DEVELOPMENT, AND STATELESSNESS The global distribution of refugees displays significant imbalances among host nations, as 69% of refugees originate from just five countries – Venezuela, Syria, Afghanistan, Ukraine, South Sudan – four of which are in the Global South (UNHCR Global Trends, 2025). While imbalances may, to some extent, be inevitable in the short term, given that most refugees flee to neighboring countries, the Global South has consistently hosted the vast majority of refugees, estimated at 85% (Schewel and Debray, 2023). Mitigating these distributional imbalances is the aim of burden-sharing, which describes international cooperation to lessen the immediate burdens on host nations of large refugee flows. Along with this geographical element of burden-sharing, there is also a temporal element, as refugee situations are increasingly protracted. Humanitarian funding has been stretched thin in this context, as it provides mostly short-term crisis-oriented responses. The international refugee framework has long 112