“The overall message is the priority to ensure that the human rights of people that are on the move, internally or externally, are respected. As well, we focus on the need to participate, to let the people and the affected population participate in the process to ensure that they can advocate for their own rights,” says Valentina Origoni, advocacy manager for French NGO Secours Islamique France, and co-facilitator for Civill Society at the 14th Global Forum on Migration and Development Summit.

Ms. Origoni explained her role as co-facilitator: “we try to allow for every organization to share their own expertise or on-field experience in order to feed this common messages. The idea is that those expertise, those different and diverse expertise, will allow us to be more effective, more impactful in our collective advocacy. Of course, each organization has its own priotities, but the idea of co-facilitating and coordinating is to ensure that collective messages can be brought forward and have an impact on the conversation.”

She concluded by commending the French chair for choosing to focus this summit on the impact of climate chane on human mobility: “we have to acknowledge the choice of France to use this as an overarching theme. It is a very relevant choice, and we have been seeing that during the process and here at the summit discussion were very relevant and we believe that they could feed the processes and ensure the right to stay of people that are impacted by climate change.”

Ms. Origoni was interviewed during the final day of the 14th GFMD Summit, which took place in Geneva, Switzerland, on 25 January 2024.