Refugee camp registration systems cannot deduplicate across agencies, causing aid theft and starvation simultaneously

When refugees flee across borders, they are registered by UNHCR, WFP, UNICEF, host-country governments, and dozens of NGOs using incompatible databases — paper ledgers, Excel sheets, proprietary systems, and biometric databases that don't interoperate. So what? The same family may receive food rations from three agencies while another family receives nothing, because there is no unified view of who has been served. So what? This creates black markets inside camps where surplus rations are sold, inflating local food prices and making purchased food unaffordable for unregistered refugees who fell through the cracks. So what? Donor governments see evidence of fraud and waste, leading to funding cuts — the WFP cut rations in East Africa by 50% in 2023 partly due to accountability concerns. So what? Reduced funding means fewer calories per person across the board, pushing malnutrition rates above emergency thresholds especially for children under 5, causing irreversible stunting that damages cognitive development permanently. So what? An entire generation of children grows up with diminished cognitive capacity, reducing their future economic productivity and ability to rebuild their home country post-conflict. This persists because humanitarian agencies compete for the same donor funding and treat beneficiary data as a competitive asset, because data-sharing raises genuine GDPR-like privacy concerns in contexts where registration data could be weaponized by persecutors, and because no single entity has authority to mandate interoperability across sovereign borders and independent NGOs.