The newly appointed UNHCR representative to Indonesia, Ann Maymann, said the “alternate pathway” was an umbrella term her organization had been using to describe efforts to develop other solutions for refugees beyond the traditional approaches of resettlement, voluntary repatriation and local integration.

“It’s actually not precisely defined because we are still working with states on finding more alternatives because as resettlement goes down, people can’t go back because their countries are still at war and local integration is very difficult to obtain,” she said at a media briefing on Tuesday.

Among the most successful alternative programs is Canada’s private sponsorship of refugees, which has resettled and provided support to more than 200,000 refugees since it was introduced in 1978.

Unlike the traditional resettlement programs, a sponsorship does not have to go through the long UNHCR waiting list but rather just the regular immigration program. One of the sponsorship initiatives is the “group of five”, by which five Canadians can support one refugee from anywhere in the world, including Indonesia.

As many as 57 foreign refugees who were in Indonesia were resettled to Canada under this program last year.

Maymann said some other countries have their own similar programs and the UNHCR continues to push more countries to have alternative mechanisms that would accommodate refugees, such as through family reunification or humanitarian visas.

“When we have meetings, whether it’s the Australians, the Canadians, we will always advocate for those countries to increase their resettlement quota, to come up with alternative pathways, and we made proposals like sponsorships or scholarships,” she said.

Even though Indonesia is among the countries with the lowest share of refugees on its territory, the issue caught the public’s attention last June when dozens of refugees camped for weeks in front of the UNHCR office in Kebon Sirih, Central Jakarta, to express their frustration over the slow handling of their resettlement applications to third countries.

The Jakarta administration allowed them to move temporarily to a shelter in Kalideres, West Jakarta, but there they faced resistance from locals. Citing budget constraints, the Jakarta administration later asked them to move out of the shelter and to seek their own accommodations with the help of the UNHCR.

“Kalideres was a wake-up call where we saw that if we are to have stability and not have these situations in front of our office, we need to have some means of livelihood that those refugees can access,” Maymann said.

As a non-party to the 1951 Refugee Convention, Indonesia is not obligated to receive or take care of refugees. However, Indonesia has issued a 2016 presidential decree that provides legal certainty and standards for government agencies to coordinate and collaborate on the handling of refugees — a move that had been lauded by the international community.

Even though it ranked fourth most-populated country with 269 million people, the majority of which are Muslim, Indonesia this year hosts only 13,657 refugees, more than half of whom came from Afghanistan.

This is just a fraction of the total 25 million refugees worldwide. Turkey hosts more than 3.6 million registered Syrian refugees, while Bangladesh hosts almost 1 million Rohingya refugees.

Out of 1.4 million refugees in the world who need resettlement, the combined quota given by 29 countries is only 81,300 refugees, according to UNHCR data.

Last year, the UNHCR helped resettle 663 refugees in Indonesia to a third country.

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