The Age, Gender and Diversity (AGD) strategy is the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR)'s longstanding commitment to ensuring that people are at the centre of its mandate. The AGD strategy promotes gender equality and human rights, particularly women’s and children’s rights, and protection of all refugees, regardless of their ethnic, social or religious background.

The 2018 Age, Gender and Diversity Participatory Assessment (AGD PA) aimed at including as many and as varied persons of concern as possible. The sampling method used, which best reflects the AGD approach, was stratification sampling. This ensures proportional representation of all categories of interest, such as age, gender, ethnicity, nationality and status.

In 2018, the total number of focus group discussions conducted was 33, encompassing 297 persons of concern. They were conducted not only at all accommodation (reception/transit) centres, but also with people of concern living at external addresses. By nationality, the participants were from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, Lebanon, Somalia, Yemen, Algeria and Kazakhstan, and included stateless people. Nine focus groups were held specifically for Farsi/Pashto-speakers.

Key findings related to integration include:

• The access to education of asylum-seeking and refugee children in Bulgaria has significantly improved. This is due to the efforts of the State Agency for Refugees and the Ministry of Education and Science to implement the relatively new legislation in the area of education, but also to the preparedness of the education system to include this new target group of children;

• The first integration agreements for resettled refugees have been concluded;

• There is a lack of integration support and sufficient social mediation for beneficiaries of international protection living at external addresses;

• Finding housing, recognition of educational certificates, and insufficient contact with the local population are areas of serious concern for beneficiaries of international protection;

• The negative attitudes towards refugees persisted in 2018. Public opinion is largely shaped by negative rhetoric in the media, as well as by the negative and misleading political discourse on the topic.

Find the full 2018 Age, Gender and Diversity Participatory Assessment attached below. See also the AGD PA from 2017 and 2016, and the findings of the AGD PA from 2014.