Since mid-2013, the International Rescue Committee has promoted community awareness about violence against women, setting up services for survivors and supporting health workers. Dr. Ahmed is one of several key staffers at the IRC-supported health facility in Mogadishu, where the first survivor of sexual violence sought support in February 2014. Since then, the IRC team has helped more than 30 survivors.

Cavine Akello was a 17-year-old high-school student when she became pregnant with her son, Rwot Okonya Billgram, whose name means “God has helped me” in the Luo language of Uganda. Cavine’s parents died when she was a child and her grandmother, who raised her, died when she was 14. The father of her child abandoned her after she told him she was pregnant and later was killed in a car accident.

On April 6 last year, Gloria Ibrahim, 29, and her family woke to the clatter of gunfire. They ran outside to find a cadre from Boko Haram, the radical Islamist militia that controls parts of northeastern Nigeria, rounding up villagers.

Last summer, militants attacked the Yazidi people of Sinjar in northwestern Iraq. The International Rescue Committeerecently traveled through northern Iraq to document this forgotten humanitarian crisis.

Intense street battles are engulfing residential neighbourhoods as the Iraqi army fights to retake Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, from ISIS.

In a speech at Georgetown University, the IRC’s president calls for new thinking about what humanitarian action is, and how it can be delivered.

Right now, an Iraqi military operation to retake the ISIS-controlled city of Mosul is underway and 200,000 terrified citizens are expected to flee the city in the first weeks. Without clear routes for families to escape safely, hundreds of thousands of people may be caught in the fighting.