Key findings regarding women’s sexual exploitation abuse across the conflict Tigray from IRC’s more comprehensive gender analysis report.

It was October 16, and there were over 280 people filling into SOMArts gallery in downtown San Francisco. This was GenR’s Force for Change event, where there was an outdoor bar with a DJ, and a huge gallery space full of tables of cookies and kabobs from Afghanistan, salads from Burma, and sweets from Syria. In a black box room off to the side of the gallery, there were huge photographs, propped up on easels, of refugees girls ages 8 through 11 embodying what they want to be when they grow up. The girls, who live all around the Bay Area, were posing as doctors, lawyers, and rock stars, in culmination of an empowerment workshop called The Vision Project, which was formed in collaboration with IRC. Guests milled around, observing, eating, enjoying themselves, and then they were gathered around a stage in the main gallery.  This was where the speech was going to take place.

“I want all children to go to school, especially girls who are told that they should stay home.” Meet 10-year-old Anastasie and other children now back in class.

This paper aims to give a voice to some of the women, girls, boys and men displaced by violence, give credit to their generous hosts, and create recommendations to UN agencies, the international donor community, and the governments of Cameroon, Chad, Niger, and Nigeria

Creating Opportunities through Mentoring, Parental Involvement and Safe Spaces (COMPASS) was implemented with refugees living in camps on the Sudan/Ethiopia border, conflict-affected communities in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), and displaced populations in north-west Pakistan.

Thirteen-year-old Helena was abducted by her uncle at gunpoint in impoverished South Sudan. He sold her to another man so he could pay for his own wife, following a practice known as the “bride price.”  

After losing her husband to the war in South Sudan, social worker Lilian Dawa fled with her two young children to Uganda, where she helps other refugee women as an IRC community volunteer.

This report evaluates the “Opportunities for Equitable Access to Quality Basic Education” (OPEQ) program aimed at enhancing learning opportunities, academic attainment and social-emotional wellbeing for more than 480,000 girls and boys in three eastern provinces of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

Asha is the mother of three young girls and this year she celebrates her first Mother’s Day in the United States. Many refugee parents, like Asha, have overcome extraordinary circumstances to give their children something we all strive for: the opportunity to live a healthy life, free from harm.