On 22 – 23 March 2022, Khartoum Process partners met for the 8th Khartoum Process Senior Officials’ Meeting, which was preceded by a Steering Committee Meeting on the morning of 22 March. The Senior Officials’ Meeting featured the Chairmanship handover from The Netherlands to South Sudan and marked the commencement of the South Sudanese Chairmanship. Delegates discussed the recent developments within the Khartoum Process and within partner organisations, deliberated upon the Work Plan for 2022/23 and explored new governance strategies for the Steering Committee.
Reflecting on the social and political developments since the last Senior Officials’ Meeting in March 2020, delegates acknowledged the value of the Khartoum Process as a dialogue platform in times of crisis, reactively adapting its agenda and allowing their participating countries to explore COVID-19 implications on mobility and migration, jointly exploring responses to these novel migration dynamics. In this context, delegates stressed the need to further ensure dynamism and flexibility, in particular in the governance of the Process.
A brief update on the European Union-African Union Summit referenced the importance of dialogue platforms such as the Khartoum Process, the Rabat Process and the Continent-to-Continent Migration and Mobility Dialogue, with the encouragement to seek out further synergies between the Khartoum and the Rabat Process, for example through joint thematic or governance meetings.
In addition to the customary updates on projects carried out in the region by institutions and organisations such as the Directorate-General for International Partnerships (DG INTPA), the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the Better Migration Management programme (BMM), the Regional Operational Centre in support of the Khartoum Process and the AU-Horn of Africa Initiative (ROCK), as well as Frontex, the meeting featured interactive breakout sessions aimed at soliciting specific inputs from delegates on the four priority thematic areas proposed by the South Sudanese Chair of the Process: (1) (Integrated) Border Management to address trafficking in human beings (THB) and smuggling of migrants (SoM); (2) Protection and Referral of vulnerable migrants and refugees; (3) Climate Change and Mobility; (4) Diaspora and Remittances.
