Shelter and settlements
Read caption A NRC staff member works alongside the indigenous Jiw community in the Colombian municipality of Puerto Concordia to build homes and community structures. After years of displacement, they have returned to their ancestral land. Photo: Edwin Tinjacá/NRC

Shelter and settlements

Shelter and settlements
Losing one’s home and community is devastating. Shelter and settlements support is the foundation of humanitarian assistance for people who have been displaced. Providing a safe place for families and communities to call "home" can be life-saving.

People reached in 2023

A total of

1,467,466

people benefited from our shelter and settlements work

 

Our expertise in shelter and settlements

The Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) provides physical safety, an identity and a foundation for recovery through its shelter and settlement programming. Working hand-in-hand with other NRC activities in the field through an integrated approach, we aim to create homes and build communities to protect people from the risks of displacement and enable them to live in dignity.

We believe that reaching our collective impact of protection and dignity is a process. This starts with saving lives by facilitating access to temporary shelter during the emergency phase, and continues even in protracted displacement, and for durable solutions. The shelter and settlements response is based on learning from displaced people what makes a shelter a home and how to transform a settlement into a community.

For more information, please see our Global Development Strategy for Shelter and Settlements 2022-2025: