Attracting, Retaining, and Diversifying Sponsors for Refugees in Community Sponsorship Programmes
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Highlights
European refugee sponsorship programmes fell far short of targets due to narrow outreach, burdensome requirements, and weak retention. To scale, they will need fundamental redesign.
- As of mid-2023, nearly 20 countries ran refugee sponsorship programmes, but most missed admission targets. Belgium admitted just 61 sponsored refugees since 2020, Germany 152, and Ireland 157, held back by limited recruitment networks and high sponsor dropout.
- Sponsor pools skew toward older, educated, faith-connected women; extensive housing, financial, and administrative requirements deter younger adults and those with full-time jobs or caregiving responsibilities.
- Retention is harmed by burnout, poor expectation management, limited local-authority awareness, and no option for repeat sponsors to support extended family members of refugees they previously welcomed.
- Programmes should broaden outreach, streamline applications, strengthen support structures, and allow repeat sponsors to name extended family.
More countries in Europe and elsewhere are exploring the potential of sponsorship programs to open up another pathway for refugee protection and integration. This reflects recognition of both the staggering scale of unmet protection needs globally and the value of involving receiving communities more directly in welcoming and supporting refugee newcomers.
The strength of these community sponsorship programs—and their ability to be sustained and scaled up over time—hinges on recruiting community members to volunteer their time and often some personal resources to support arriving refugees. This report examines the challenges sponsorship programs have faced to recruiting, retaining, and diversifying the sponsors involved in these efforts, as well as strategies that programs could and in some cases already use to overcome these obstacles. It highlights findings from surveys and interviews conducted in three case-study countries (Belgium, Germany, and Ireland) as well as evidence from other countries that operate sponsorship programs.
This MPI Europe study is part of the Building Capacity for Private Sponsorship in the European Union (CAPS-EU) Project, which aims to build the capacity of European, national, and local governments and nongovernmental stakeholders to design, implement, sustain, and scale up community sponsorship programs for refugees.
Table of Contents
1 Introduction
2 Common Recruitment and Retention Challenges
A. Conducting Outreach and Identifying Potential Sponsors
B. Designing Program Requirements and Processes that Encourage Participation
C. Retaining Sponsors
3 Three Pillars for Securing, Scaling, and Diversifying Recruitment and Retention
A. Invest in Outreach and Activities to Reach New Audiences
B. Address Barriers to Participation Linked to Program Design and Enhance Support Mechanisms for Sponsors
C. Prepare Sponsors and Local Communities for Refugee Arrivals to Maximise Sponsor Retention
4 Conclusions and Recommendations
About the CAPS-EU Project
The project's analysis seeks to build European, national and local government, and nongovernmental stakeholders’ capacity to design, implement, sustain, and scale up community sponsorship programmes for refugees.
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