SIGAR 15-83 AUDIT REPORT
WHAT SIGAR REVIEWED
As a result of more than three decades of war and instability, millions of Afghans have fled for protection in Pakistan, Iran, and other neighboring countries. As of December 2014, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) reported that nearly 2.5 million Afghans, including 1.5 million registered refugees, were living in Pakistan, and 950,000 registered Afghan refugees were living in Iran. Since 2002, the Department of State (State) has allocated over $950 million to programs intended to assist Afghan refugees in Pakistan and Iran and returnees in Afghanistan, as well as other vulnerable groups of Afghans. State’s Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration oversees the department’s refugee and returnee programs. State provides funding to UNHCR, other international organizations, and non-governmental organizations to implement assistance programs. State relies on UNHCR—which in turn relies on the governments of Pakistan and Iran—to determine the number of Afghan refugees and returnees, and uses this estimate, among other data, to help form the basis for the bureau’s funding requests.
In May 2012, the governments of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran developed the Solutions Strategy for Afghan Refugees, to Support Voluntary Repatriation, Sustainable Reintegration and Assistance to Host Countries (Solutions Strategy) to address the problems that Afghan refugees and returnees face. According to the strategy, the three countries agreed to work towards providing a minimum standard of living and livelihood opportunities for returnees, and preserving asylum space for refugees, among other initiatives.
The objectives of this audit were to assess the extent to which (1) State and UNHCR verify the number of Afghan refugees in Pakistan and Iran, and (2) the Afghan government has implemented the Solutions Strategy. In this report, SIGAR discusses, but was unable to provide details about, how the Iranian government determines the number of Afghan refugees.