There’s one thing 42-year old Mokube Bertha knows for sure – to ensure the well-being of women and girls in her community, women need to empower other women. And that’s exactly what Mokube’s goal is.

Aster and Gidey are two mothers who had to leave their homes as tensions grew, witnessing extreme atrocities along the way. Now having reached safety, they talked of raising awareness of what they had experienced, wishing for the world to know what happened to their lives and families.

Dalal, 18, wears her best dress, green dotted with tarnished gold beads. She and her friends sit close together on the concrete floor of a tent in a temporary settlement in Akkar, Lebanon, not far from the Syrian border.