Most of us take the world we live in for granted, all the privileges we enjoy without even considering them to be something out of the ordinary, like safety, education, freedom of expression and so on, but there are millions out there who live as refugees far away from home in places such as these 10 countries that have the most refugees.
It’s a difficult situation to understand – living in a place that’s so bad that you would rather uproot your entire life just to be able to have a life. Whether that’s due to war or political instability or any other type of crisis, it doesn’t really matter in the end because the result is the same – millions of people fleeing their native lands in order to stay safe.
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The UN Refugee Agency counts over 65.3 million people that were forcibly displaced across the world. The number is composed of 21.3 million people who were straight out refugees, 40.8 million people who were internally displaced and 3.2 million asylum seekers. The numbers round up 2015 and tell a story that’s getting darker and darker since there were 5.8 million people more on the list than there were at the end of 2014.
Considering everything that’s happened in 2016 thus far and the number of refugees reaching the gates of Europe, when the UN stops counting at the end of the year, we’re going to see a much worse number.
“The global population of forcibly displaced people today is larger than the entire population of the United Kingdom. If they were a country, the forcibly displaced would be the 21st largest in the world,” the UN’s report reads. Not only has the number doubled over the past decade, but it also continues to grow as more and more people flee in the face of danger, families run together trying to find a new place to set roots to give their children a better life. Over the past year alone there have been hundreds upon hundreds of deaths as boats carrying refugees overturned, making it clear to everyone that these people aren’t putting their lives in danger because the places they left behind were a dream to live in. And neither they are going to some amazing places like the Most Charitable Countries in the World.
Where do these people come from? Well, between 2014 and 2015, the United Nation notes that the number one source of refugees is Syria, followed by Afghanistan. Then comes Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Congo, Central African Republic, Myanmar, Eritrea, and Columbia.
While the situation in Syria and Afghanistan is fairly well known, the crisis taking place in the other occupants of the list of countries that have the most refugees aren’t that popular in the media. In South Sudan, for instance, there’s a humanitarian crisis due as a fallout of the power battle taking place there. In Congo, there’s widespread violence and horrible abuses of human rights. The list goes on and on, and it paints a clear picture of the world we live in.
Well, without further ado, here are the 10 countries that have the most refugees, a list created with the help of the United Nations Refugee Agency.
