At the close of the 14th GFMD Summit, held in Geneva on 23-25 January 2024, we document the thoughts and reflections on the 2022-24 GFMD process of two members of the civil society co-facilitation team.
The 14th Summit of the 2022-24 Global Forum on Migration and Development (GFMD)*, under the French Chairmanship, was held in Geneva on 23-25 January 2024. As the Summit drew to a close, Mamadou Goïta and Marie Lobjoy, two of four GFMD civil society facilitators** for 2022-24, reflected on their experiences within the GFMD process and at the Summit, the role and achievements of civil society within the GFMD process, and key lessons to take forward into the forthcoming Colombian Chairmanship.
Mr. Goïta, representing the Pan African Network in the Defense of Migrants’ Rights (PANiDMR), is a long-standing veteran of the GFMD process. “I have participated in all fourteen GFMDs,” he recalls. “In terms of formal roles, I was previously a co-chair in Marrakesh in 2018, in the GFMD’s previous format, and for this GFMD I’m delighted to be a co-facilitator within the Civil Society Mechanism. So I’ve been here in those formal roles, as a civil society delegate, and as part of wider African civil society and non-state GFMD delegations, since the GFMD began.”
For Ms. Lobjoy, Advocacy Officer at Secours Catholique-Caritas France, the GFMD was, by contrast, a new experience. “This is my first GFMD, so of course it’s been extremely interesting to get to know the process by being involved from the very start of the preparations,” says Ms. Lobjoy, “My organisation was selected to be involved as a co-facilitator because this GFMD was chaired by France, and a large part of my role, alongside that of the other co-facilitators, was to coordinate French civil society and engage French civil society organisations, to get them interested and active in the process.”
Consultation, connection, and diverse voices: Civil society preparations for the GFMD Summit
Civil society preparations for the 2024 GFMD Summit began early in 2023, when the Civil Society Mechanism began building its own year-long process to feed into GFMD activities. Both Ms. Lobjoy and Mr. Goïta played key roles in this programme of self-organised GFMD civil society preparatory events and activities, which soon became known as the civil society ‘Road from Abuja to Geneva’, and throughout formal preparatory activities instituted by the French Chair.
“The preparatory process leading to the Summit included many different events, both thematic workshops and preparatory meetings,” said Ms. Lobjoy. “For us as civil society, it was really important to be able to have a preparatory process within our Mechanism, to really be able to define the key points that we wanted to bring forward, as a civil society delegation, to the Summit discussions.”
Civil society consultations and exchanges throughout the ‘Road from Abuja to Geneva’ brought a particular value to Ms. Lobjoy’s daily focus on the impact of climate change on human mobility, the overarching theme of the 2022-24 GFMD under the French Chairmanship. “For me, working on this issue from Europe, the global civil society consultation process was incredibly enriching, as it enabled me to learn about the work of civil society from affected communities, the challenges they are facing, and the solutions they want to bring to the table,” she reflects. “On this theme, as for the other five thematic priorities for 2022-24, consultation within our Mechanism was a way to try to represent the full, rich diversity of our delegation, even though that’s not always completely possible in a process such as this.”
For Mr. Goïta, the 2022-24 GFMD represented a further step in strengthening the coordination and cooperation of African non-state actors in the international space. “In recent GFMDs, we as African non-state actors have really begun to come together to strategise around the thematic priorities of each edition,” he stated. “For the 2017-18 edition, the negotiation process for the Global Compact on Migration (GCM)*** had already provided a major opportunity for African civil society to come together and better organise our advocacy, and this process really benefited us for the GFMD.”
For the 2022-24 edition, African civil society played a central role in the year-long ‘Road from Abuja to Geneva.’ The global civil society GFMD process was informally launched at the Abuja Civil Society Forum, held in Abuja, Nigeria, from 30 January to 1 February 2023, which brought together representatives of African civil society and diaspora from all regions of Africa.
“In 2022-24, it’s really been different because, as African civil society, we explicitly decided to use the Summit not just as an event but as a process, and this has been a valuable change in the paradigm and in our mindset,” Mr. Goïta remarks. “Networks like PANiDMR have been active for many years in capacity-building and cooperation within Africa, and we have long used that work as a platform to see how we could include those participants in the GFMD. But there are many others who are not included in these networks, who have never been involved in the discussions, and who we meet only during the Summit. So in this edition we decided to involve all those who had registered and could come, to engage them not just in the Summit but in the preparatory process.”
Mr. Goïta charts the extensive work at the pan-African level throughout 2022-24 to widen the engagement of African civil society and non-state actors in the GFMD process, and build relationships and connections with other regional civil society migration networks from around the world. “We had Abuja as the launch, but before that we had been working on some of the thematic issues, organising this work at the pan-African level and appealing to other regional networks to join us,” he explained. “After Abuja, we held a similar meeting in Dakar to ensure those who couldn’t be in Abuja could be involved.”
For Mr. Goïta, improved engagement of African non-state actors with institutions and State authorities is a clear added value of international processes such as the GFMD. “We held meetings with our African institutions and with the African Union,” he says. “Doing that work on the continent was essential: it broadens engagement because we’re not requiring people to physically travel outside of the continent in order to take part. With that, and the instrumental function of the Abuja Declaration in making it a consistent and developmental process, a whole new constituency of African stakeholders have been able to join the discussion and make their voices heard.”
The day before the 14th GFMD Summit began in Geneva, a third and final Civil Society GFMD Preparatory Meeting focused on civil society space and the global state of play for migration and human rights.
Ms. Lobjoy points to the value of this opportunity to place the GFMD and the work of its civil society delegates into its broader context. “It was a fairly new approach, but it was extremely important to be able to share our common perspectives and challenges, as civil society, with all our rich experience from different countries, regions, and working contexts,” she says. “Some core commonalities emerged, notably the fear of a shrinking space for civil society to be able to meaningfully contribute to dialogue, and a broader crisis of solidarity in which we see the widespread dehumanisation of the migrants that we work for and with. We are all fighting the same fight, in different ways, and I think that moving the discussion away from solely focusing on the GFMD priorities really helped us all to prepare for the Summit ahead.”
Leveraging the GFMD process for the benefit of civil society
Both Mr. Goïta and Ms. Lobjoy point to how involvement in the GFMD and other international processes has had positive effects for civil society at large. “Both the GCM and the GFMD have had a particular impact, in the sense that they’ve created opportunities to bring African civil society together in a way that hasn’t happened before,” says Mr. Goïta. “African civil society stakeholders met at the GFMD held in Brussels in 2007, but participants were mainly from the diaspora and not the continent. Since then, we’ve come from an African GFMD civil society caucus meeting that we organised at the Manila Summit in 2008, through the establishment of PANiDMR in 2009-10 as a continental network working on migration issues and migrant rights, to here in 2022-24 with the launch in Abuja and the central role in 2022-24 of the GFMD African Non-State Actors Platform.So the GFMD has played a major, instrumental role in our organising.”
The impact for French civil society has been more mixed, but not without value. “With this GFMD being chaired by France, it was a good opportunity for us to remind the government of the commitments they’d made as part of the GCM, and a ‘way in’ to expand dialogue with French State representatives,” says Ms. Lobjoy. “For my organisation, which works together with partners at both the national and international level, it was also a good opportunity to bridge the gap we sometimes see between the local and global level, and bring the voices of our colleagues working within France to an international space.”
Ms. Lobjoy nonetheless points to the location of the Summit as a missed opportunity to further engage French civil society. “The fact that the Summit was organised in Geneva and not in Paris definitely had an impact on French civil society’s capacity to participate, and to see a value in participating,” she reflects. “In their minds the location made it a UN process, which they view as somewhat disconnected from the reality they are facing on the ground. In many ways that made it harder to engage them fully.”
‘Make it meaningful’: Shrinking space for civil society within the GFMD
For both Ms. Lobjoy and Mr. Goïta, civil society preparations for the Summit and contributions at the Summit itself were significantly impacted by questions of participation. “When we talk about participation, inclusivity, and who’s at the table, we need to ask how they get to the table,” says Ms. Lobjoy. “There were several issues that affected the meaningful participation of civil society in the lead-up to this Summit, for example the fact that some delegates from the Global South could not obtain visas. This raises the broader question, which is when talking about having an inclusive dialogue, how do we actually get there? How do we ensure that civil society participation is not just a check box, but is actually meaningful in terms of how we are practically able to contribute to the discussion?”
She points to the negative impacts of ongoing efforts to maintain a space for civil society within the GFMD process. “A lot of our preparatory work as civil society was taken up with how we could ensure that we participated, and this was in places quite detrimental to really preparing the issues that we wanted to talk about,” she reflects. “It took a lot of energy out of the policy conversations, and it was disappointing that we couldn’t always focus fully on the substantive aspects of the Summit, because we were working so hard just to make sure we were here, in the room.”
Echoing her comments, Mr. Goïta draws on his long GFMD experience to note several backward steps for civil society participation at this GFMD summit. “We have been fighting to get this space at the GFMD, and it has slowly opened up. But in Marrakesh there were 280 civil society delegates, and here at this Summit there are only 120 allowed: it’s simply not possible that we lose the space in this way,” he says. “That said, I do think that in the end there was a recognition that you cannot have this sort of dialogue without civil society organisations, because we have the expertise. We’d done such extensive work to update our government delegations before the Summit, so it was clear that there was no reason to say, ‘You can’t come into this room to discuss the thematic issues.’”
Asking the difficult questions: Reflecting on the role of civil society in the GFMD process
For Ms. Lobjoy, the selection of climate and environmental mobility as the overarching theme for the 2022-24 GFMD represented a victory for extensive civil society advocacy to include this theme prior to the Summit’s preparations. “We did a substantial amount of work to ensure this issue was included, because of the huge human rights impacts we know that climate change has,” she says. “So this was an extremely positive outcome.”
She further points to the role of civil society in ensuring that GFMD discussions remain grounded in the realities of issues as they are experienced on the ground. “We as civil society have to be the ones asking the difficult questions, and it’s our responsibility to deconstruct some of the key questions,” she says. “We heard a lot on the theme of migration as an adaptation strategy in the context of climate change, for example, but that does not necessarily reflect what we’re hearing from affected communities, which is ‘we want to stay, and to be able to have the right to stay.’ Shifting that narrative was really important, and within both the preparatory meetings and at the Summit we emphasised that point repeatedly. It’s about how we deconstruct the agenda, when we see the discussion becoming disconnected from the people that we work for. And that’s what we’ve been trying to do during this edition of the GFMD.”
Mr. Goïta additionally highlights the continuity that civil society provides within the GFMD process. “All the stakeholders are important, but we are the ones who have been very active in this process. Those who work for governments come and go, indeed governments themselves come and go, but we need to be here because we have a history in this process. We provide the memory and the continuity.”
Looking to the future: Lessons from 2022-24
Both Mr. Goïta and Ms. Lobjoy are keen to draw positive lessons for civil society from the 2022-24 GFMD process. “The biggest lesson is that without communication on the needs of all stakeholders, it’s difficult to make decisions on how the process will work,” says Mr. Goïta. “So we are starting now, by engaging the incoming Colombian Chair in those discussions on participation. Our ability to be heard depends on their capacity to listen, but this need for early and consistent communication is a lesson that we need to incorporate going forward.”
For Ms. Lobjoy, the question of how to bring migrant voices to the GFMD more meaningfully and consistently is crucial. “What we’ve been observing throughout the world is this tendency to embrace the securitisation approach to migration, rather than the developmental approach that the GFMD is supposed to be about,” she reflects. “I think that each Summit roundtable discussion should start with a testimony from someone who is either a migrant or works directly with migrants, for example, to go beyond statistics and bring it back to the reality of the human lives that we’re talking about. We want to bring the voices of the communities that are affected, and that can never be done as well as when they’re here and actually get to speak in a space like this.”
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* The Global Forum on Migration and Development (GFMD) is a government-led initiative that brings together States, city mayors, business representatives, and civil society organizations concerned with migration and development issues. Its goal is to discuss a range of topics on migration, propose innovative solutions, share policy ideas, and create partnerships and cooperation in an informal dialogue setting. ICMC coordinates civil society engagement in the GFMD since 2011.
** The four 2022-24 GFMD civil society co-facilitators were Mamadou Goïta (Pan African Network in the Defense of Migrants’ Rights, PANiDMR), Marie Lobjoy (Secours Catholique-Caritas France), Brice Monnou (Forum of International Solidarity Organizations for Migration, FORIM), and Valentina Origoni (Secours Islamique France).
Watch ‘Coordinating Civil Society Efforts’, a video interview with co-facilitator Valentina Origoni.
*** The Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration is an international agreement adopted by 152 States in December 2018. As the first-ever global framework for migration governance, it aims to increase international collaboration on all aspects related to migration, including human rights, humanitarian needs, and development.