In 2010, the International Rescue Committee responded to a devastating earthquake in Haiti that forced more than two million people from their homes.

When one of the strongest storms in recorded history slammed the Philippines in 2013, more than 6,000 people lost their lives and 90 percent of homes in the hardest hit areas were damaged or destroyed.

Today, as South Sudan marks the anniversary of its independence, the new nation is engulfed by a growing humanitarian crisis. Hopes for a peaceful future expressed four years ago are now dashed. Thousands of people have been killed, and more than two million uprooted from their homes by civil war. Unspeakable atrocities have been committed by all parties to the conflict.

In 1984, Raesa,* just 14 years old, left her family in Jordan and moved to Syria with her husband to start a new life. When civil war broke out 28 years later, Raesa was forced to flee with her children, triplets, and seek refuge back in her own country.“We left Syria through the village of Tell Shihab and went to Ramtha [in Jordan]”, Raesa says, who is now the sole breadwinner for her family. Her husband decided to stay behind with his second wife and their family.

For the first time ever, the world is facing the very real possibility of not one, but four simultaneous famines—in South Sudan, Somalia, Nigeria and Yemen. Thirty million people are facing starvation and living on the brink of what could become the biggest humanitarian crisis of our time.

The world’s newest nation, South Sudan, has been ravaged by civil war and political infighting since 2013. After a peace agreement failed to unite the country last July, the conflict quickly spread to previously unaffected areas. That’s when the war came to Angelina Nyatuoy’s home in Mirmir, a small province of Panyijar County, located in South Sudan’s Unity state.

When one of the strongest storms in recorded history slammed the Philippines in 2013, more than 6,000 people lost their lives and 90 percent of homes in the hardest hit areas were damaged or destroyed.

Since 2014, economic upheaval and political turmoil in Venezuela have caused 1.5 million people to flee the country, and this number is likely to rise as the crisis intensifies. Escaping devastating shortages, unemployment and soaring inflation, these refugees turn often to their country's closest neighbor, Colombia.

From major cities to remote villages, women and girls worldwide face harassment, violence, discrimination and a lack of equal opportunities. Their lives are threatened, their potential robbed. This is especially – brutally – true for women and girls in the world’s conflict zones. According to International Rescue Committee violence prevention experts, the toughest places to be a woman today are: