The spirit of self-help is the root of all genuine growth in the individual.

Updated at 22:45 on August 20: I am sharing some of what I have looked up on this subject since it was originally posted.

I have taken the liberty of arranging specific parts of some of the pdfs from the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) into jpgs. I apologize if it looks sloppy. This table shows the nation of origin for refugees in 1993 and 1994.

Today, roughly 40% of the refugees today are in Asia, while Africa accounts for roughly a quarter. See the pie chart.

In 1993, by my reckoning, the numbers were about 35% for Asia, 37% for Africa. The UNHCR archives are available here in pdf if you are interested. Without doing any more math than that, it’s clear that a huge difference is the number of refugees in Africa.

I want to understand why that is.

Possibly more instructive is this table that shows the new arrivals of asylum seekers between 1993 and 1994. Note the combined million refugees arriving in Tanzania and Burundi… from Rwanda. Remember Rwanda?

This may be a much more significant factor than the collapse of the USSR. That collapse caused a lot of migration, but doesn’t seem to have created many refugees.

If you look at the graphic at the top of this article, the number of refugees worldwide looks to decrease by ~2 million between 1996 and 1997. According to the FAO, ~2 million Rwandans returned home during that time.