Today marks the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women and the start of 16 Days of Activism against Gender Violence. International Rescue Committee grants intern Jane Yang writes about how the IRC protects and empowers women who have made the dangerous trip from Somalia to a refugee camp in northeastern Kenya.

Drawing on its decades of experience responding to crises in over 40 countries worldwide and resettling refugees in 25 cities across the U.S., in this brief the International Rescue Committee recommends nine actions for the Biden-Harris Administration to take in its first year.

A new IRC report brings forward the voices of 852 refugee and displaced women living in some of the most underfunded and forgotten humanitarian crises in 15 African countries to learn how the pandemic and the humanitarian response to it has affected their safety.

Today, more than half of the world’s 59.5 million forcibly displaced people live in urban areas and their average length of displacement is over a decade.2 In Asia, the world’s fastest urbanizing continent, countries like Iran and Pakistan are among the top-10 major refugee-hosting countries in the world, while Afghanistan remains the second largest source of refugees globally behind Syria.3 In Southeast Asia, Thailand serves as the region’s primary destination for refugees and asylum seekers, with over half a million people of concern living in the country in 2015. These trends have significant implications for cities within the region, including heightened challenges for providing basic services to the city’s existing inhabitants as well as new residents. They also impact the changing humanitarian landscape, where traditional humanitarian responses have been most often designed for camp or rural/remote contexts. In order to better understand these issues, to learn from challenges and successes, and to identify more appropriate ways of working, the International Rescue Committee (IRC) and the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) hosted an Urban Practitioner Workshop on Meeting Needs in a Context of Urban Displacement in Asia. The aim of the workshop was to bring together humanitarian, international development, community organizations, and local municipal actors called into action by various urban crises within the region.