Complementary Pathways: Key factors in future growth
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Highlights
About 60 labour, family reunification and education programmes open to refugees operated in 2024. Scaling these complementary pathways requires government buy-in and stable funding.
- Only about 96,000 refugees were resettled globally in 2023—including roughly 15,000 to EU Member States—leaving complementary pathways a critical but underused option for the world’s 43.7 million refugees and others in need of international protection as of mid-2024.
- As of 2024, about 60 complementary pathway programmes operated worldwide, including around 25 in Europe; they have expanded protection for under-represented groups and offered flexibility during crises such as the 2022 invasion of Ukraine and 2021 fall of Kabul to the Taliban.
- Fragmentation, competition for limited EU funding, and weak government engagement undermine scalability, as programmes often compete for the same grants without structures to reduce duplication.
- Scaling will require integrating governments as core partners, building shared infrastructure and application platforms, diversifying funding, and creating formal cross-programme communication forums.
Complementary pathways have grown in popularity in recent years. These programs—which include humanitarian admission, sponsorship, and education- and employment-based mobility programs for refugees and others in need of protection—promise to better engage receiving communities in welcoming newcomers, promote public support for arriving refugees, and capitalize on available private resources to sustain and expand protection-based pathways.
However, many complementary pathways have yet to achieve the scale needed to more effectively address displacement and mobility pressures. This is, in part, because they can be resource intensive, often require coordination between a range of actors, and may struggle to secure reliable funding—issues that suggest the need for a better ecosystem of support, one that can facilitate these programs’ growth and help them to fulfill their objectives.
This MPI Europe report explores the elements needed to build this supportive ecosystem, drawing on interviews, expert roundtables, and lessons from the three-year Complementary Pathways Network (COMET) Project. The study then offers strategies and recommendations for addressing these challenges and, in doing so, strengthening protection pathways.
Table of Contents
1 Introduction
2 The Impacts of Growing Diversity in the Humanitarian Pathways Space
A. The Strengths of a Diversified Field
B. New Actors, Growing Complexity, and Coordination Challenges
3 How to Build a Supportive Ecosystem for Growing Complementary Pathways
4 Conclusions
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