Action Agenda Blog

This year, the Women’s Refugee Commission decided to adopt a “five-country strategy” to more carefully focus our efforts on achieving change on the ground from what we’ve learned in our research and global assessments.

We have chosen to focus on five countries, selected because they represent different geographic regions, different displacement contexts (urban/camp, refugee/internally displaced/returnees, protracted displacement/newer emergencies/post-conflict reconstruction) and on the basis of our long-term experience in those countries. This does not mean that we will not visit other countries, but our ongoing focus will be on these five countries, which will provide case studies for ongoing global advocacy.

The five countries are: Northern Uganda, Thai-Burma border, South Sudan (and Darfur—if/when security permits), Liberia and Jordan. We will also include an emergency context, when an appropriate situation emerges, that we can track over time. The countries may be changed if the security situation does not permit frequent visits or if they are no longer helpful case studies for promoting our advocacy agenda.

Now that our areas of international work—reproductive health, gender-based violence, livelihoods, displaced youth, fuel and firewood and disabilities—are well-defined and unlikely to change in the near term, we can increase our attention on how we promote change—both in policy and practice—and how we monitor that change is in fact taking place and improving the lives of displaced women, children and young people.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 4th, 2009 at 2:37 PM by Elizabeth Beresford and is filed under staff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.