UNHCR has been working with NGOs since we first began helping the forcibly displaced in the early 1950s. As our work and size grew to cope with emerging refugee crises in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, especially in Africa, Asia and Central America, so did our ties with a wide range of newly formed humanitarian and refugee-related NGOs.
In 2007, UNHCR adopted the Global Humanitarian Platform’s Principles of Partnership that set out common standards of equality, transparency, complementarity and a results-oriented approach among all humanitarian groups. We integrated the Principles of Partnership in to our ‘Framework for Implementing with Partners’ as an institutional approach to collaborative partnerships.