This article was first published in November 2015 and updated in June 2022.
20 June is World Refugee Day.
More than 100 million people have been forced to flee their homes, the UNHCR announced in May 2022, the highest number ever.
From a ballet dancer to the youngest Nobel laureate, here are just of few of the refugees who have made a difference.
More than 100 million people have been forced to flee their homes, the highest number ever, due to conflict, violence, and persecution. That equates to more than 1% of the global population and includes refugees, asylum seekers and those displaced internally.
Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February, more than 6 million people have fled to neighbouring countries.
“It’s a record that should never have been set,” UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Filippo Grandi said when the UNHCR released the figures in May.
“This must serve as a wake-up call to resolve and prevent destructive conflicts, end persecution, and address the underlying causes that force innocent people to flee their homes.”
20 June is World Refugee Day, when the world's refugees are honoured.
Here are just a handful of the millions of refugees who have gone on to make a difference in the country they now call home - and beyond.
1. Malala Yousafzai
Malala was born in Pakistan in 1997, where her father ran a girls' school in the Swat Valley. When she was 11, the Taliban took control of the town and banned girls from attending school. She started to speak out about the right of girls to receive an education and in 2012 she was shot in the head on the school bus by a masked gunman.
Her family fled to the UK and after months of surgery, Malala and her father set up the Malala Fund, dedicated to opportunities for girls. In 2014, she became the youngest ever Nobel laureate when she received the Nobel Peace Prize - and in 2020 she graduated from Oxford University. In June 2022, she joined the Friday climate protests to explain how educating girls can be part of the climate solution.
2. Alek Wek
When Alek was just nine, civil war broke out in her home country, now known as South Sudan. “Life as we knew it came to a devastating end,” she told the UNHCR. “Our parents tried to shield us from the conflict but the sounds of gunfire and the vibrations of explosions filled us with dread. Dead bodies filled the landscape.”
After surviving on what they could forage in the bush, her family escaped to Khartoum and Alek's mother sent her and a sister to London, where she learnt English and was spotted by a model scout: “In a matter of years, I went from a faceless refugee statistic to one of the most recognizable faces in the world.”
In 2013, she was appointed a UN Goodwill Ambassador, and in 2015 she helped to launch the Sustainable Development Goals.
Speaking about the impact of seeing Wek on runways and magazine covers, Oscar-winning actress Lupita Nyong'o said: "When I saw Alek, I inadvertently saw a reflection of myself that I could not deny. Now I had a spring in my step because I felt more seen, more appreciated by the far away keepers of beauty."
3. Sergey Brin
He might be one of America’s most famous entrepreneurs, but Sergey Brin was not actually born in the US. In 1979, with the help of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, Sergey and his family managed to leave the Soviet Union, where they’d been facing growing anti-Semitism. Sergey, who was just six when he left his native country, found the transition tough: “It was a difficult year for him, the first year,” his mother said in this interview for Moment magazine.
The difficult start didn’t last long: in 1998, he co-founded Google with Larry Page.
Here he is in 2017, speaking about leadership and entrepreneurship at the World Economic Forum's Annual Meeting:
4. Madeleine Albright
“We came to the United States with nothing,” the late Madeleine Albright, who passed away in March 2022, recalled to the International Rescue Commission in a video in 2013. Her family, who were fleeing the 1948 Czechoslovak coup d’état, were welcomed by the people of Denver with open arms: “People were so incredibly nice, and provided us with furniture and Christmas presents.”
It’s something she will never forget: “I will always feel an immense gratitude to this country, one shared by the millions of other refugees who have come to our shores in the years since,” she told Time. After settling in the US, she went on to become the first woman to serve as secretary of state.
5. Ahmad Joudeh
Ahmad Joudeh was born 'stateless' with no passport into the Palestinian refugee camp Yarmouk in Syria. He learned to dance at the Higher Institute for Dramatic Arts in Damascus. When war broke out in Syria, the family's home was bombed, and he faced death threats from extremists for being a ballet dancer.
After graduating, he filmed a dance video on the rooftop of the family's home that went viral and he was invited to join the Dutch National Ballet. He now lives in the Netherlands and is the artistic director for his charitable Dance or Die Foundation.
In an interview with the World Economic Forum podcast Radio Davos, he said: "I am super lucky that I am a dancer and I got seen and liked and shared on social media. And that's why I got all this opportunities. But other people, they are still there and they are still struggling and dying and life is horrible in there. And I want to be their voice.
"I go to my ballet class every day to improve myself and practice to become an elegant voice for them. So the people with this privileged life would listen to me when I ask them just to think of them."
