Scalabrini Centre Annual Report 2025
We started 2025 with the confidence that we would continue delivering established programmes that address the holistic needs of people on the move, alongside a dedicated focus on our key advocacy goal: restoring full access to the asylum system. However, before even the first month of the year had passed, we, together with our civil society partners in South Africa and humanitarian actors across the world, were confronted with the announcement of a funding freeze by the US State Department. Within a month, this became the final termination of all funding agreements.
As Scalabrini Centre, we lost approximately 40% of our regular programme and salary budget and were initially forced to suspend many of our services while redefining our programming. The US funding cuts predominantly affected our direct service delivery programmes, including training and business development sponsorships, personal development courses, experiential learning opportunities and welfare support for vulnerable groups. We were forced to significantly scale down our Wellbeing and Development programme and suspend certain activities within our Integration Pathways programme. With a heavy heart, we also had to close our UNITE programme, which served as a civic education initiative that had been running in various high schools for many years. We retrenched colleagues and began the difficult process of rebuilding our work with fewer resources and reduced administrative capacity, while prioritising the continuation of as many essential service delivery activities as possible.
To make matters worse, this shift in the funding landscape was accompanied by an intensified campaign against refugees and forced migrants, increased conflict, persistent and protracted refugee situations, and a growing shift in language from humanitarian protection towards terms such as the externalisation of asylum applications, increased border pushbacks, detention and deportation, and an overall anti-migration rhetoric. We shouldn’t forget that migration crises, as politicians like to call them, are not a human mobility issue, but rather an issue of failed state governance; migration doesn’t equal crises. Rather, crises emerge when governments fail to regulate border crossing and access to immigration documentation through lawful, efficient and transparent procedures.
In South Africa in particular, we witnessed an intentional diminishing of human rights-based approaches, with detrimental consequences for the asylum system and further restrictions on the dignity and rights of people on the move, as envisaged in the White Paper on Citizenship, Immigration and Refugee Protection.
While the resources available to advocate with and for people on the move, and to provide integration support services, continue to dwindle, human mobility remains a permanent aspect of human development. The new normal of the humanitarian funding landscape therefore presents a deeply concerning picture: one in which growing national interests risk overshadowing the reality that migration is neither an isolated event nor something that can simply be confined or controlled. The lack of political will to acknowledge and respond to this reality is deeply concerning, particularly when it is a reality that St John Baptist Scalabrini himself recognised more than a century ago, as he reflected from the emptying countryside of Northern Italy in the late 1880s:
“Seeds migrate on the wings of the wind. Plants migrate from continent to continent on the waves of the seas and rivers. Birds and other animals move from place to place. But even more do human beings migrate…”
I would like to express my sincere gratitude to the Scalabrini Board, our staff team, the Scalabrini International Migration Network, our donors, sponsors and partners for their collective support during these challenging times. As we look ahead, I encourage us to remain steadfast in our commitment to advocating alongside people on the move. It is through the combination of hope, solidarity and purposeful action that we can continue to defend dignity, uphold rights and work towards a more just and inclusive society.
Giulia Treves, Director
