Yves Norodom, a 21-year-old refugee from the Democratic Republic of Congo living in Brazil, is one of 45.2 million displaced people around the world – the largest number in 20 years.

Refugees dig for water in a dried up watering hole in Jamam camp, in South Sudan’s Upper Nile state. Credit: Jared Ferrie/IPS

In its annual report Global Trends 2012: Displacement, the New 21st Century Challenge, released Wednesday, the UNHCR said 28.8 million of that total were internally displaced persons (IDPs), 15.4 million were refugees outside their own countries, and nearly one million were asylum-seekers.

Some 35.8 million people were under the UNHCR mandate by late 2012 – the second highest number on record.

On average, 23,000 people were forced to flee their homes every day in 2012.

Norodom told IPS that he fled his country, the DRC, for Kenya, and from there to the United Kingdom, before finally making his way to Brazil in 2010 without documents or belongings.

“In Congo, everyone feared for their lives,” he said. “I was struggling to survive, I did the impossible to make it. My job was to save my own skin, and I was 17 years old at the time.”

He is currently unemployed, but he dreams of one day returning to school and attending the public university in Rio de Janeiro to study chemical engineering.

“I wouldn’t say I’m very happy, but at least I’m alive and I’m ok,” he said.

Norodom is one of 4,715 refugees of 76 nationalities in Brazil, according to figures from CONARE, the government’s national refugee agency. Of that total, 2,012 receive assistance from the UNHCR.

Brazil has adequate laws on refugees and offers them the same public services that are enjoyed by the country’s citizens. But this country of 198 million people receives a far smaller number of refugees than much poorer countries like Pakistan, which currently hosts over 1.6 million refugees.

The rise in the cost of living in Brazil’s cities and the day-to-day difficulties in making a living faced by a large part of the population also affect the quality of life of refugees, said Aline Thuller, with the Catholic NGO Caritas.

“A majority of the refugees live in favelas (shantytowns) and other poor neighbourhoods. They have the same rights to public services and face the same difficulties as Brazilians. Most of them work in the informal sector,” she told IPS.

“There is still a lot of prejudice” against refugees, Thuller said.

In the past, the refugees assisted by Caritas were mainly Angolan men, who were fleeing forced recruitment during the 27-year civil war in that former Portuguese colony in southern Africa.

But today, many pregnant women and entire families reach Rio de Janeiro as refugees.

The state of Rio de Janeiro, which receives the second-largest number of refugees after São Paulo, is in the final stages of designing a state-wide refugee policy.

Under the new policy, “working groups will be created by thematic area and will organise practical activities, to facilitate refugees’ access to basic rights,” Thuller said.