Editor’s Note: This morning, WRC published a white paper entitled, “Displaced Women and Girls: A Data Ecosystem Mapping.” It is a vital precursor to our forthcoming flagship initiative to monitor the state of women and girls in displacement. To help our readers understand the importance of both the paper and the larger research project, I spoke with our Director of Research, Julianne Deitch, earlier this week. The following conversation has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
Ruth Fertig: This paper is the first output of a WRC research project on the state of women and girls in displacement worldwide. Before we dive into the paper itself, can you tell me about the impetus for the broader research project?
Julianne Deitch: Sure. So, we know that we’re at a critical juncture in terms of women and girls in displacement. In 2025, around 54 million women and girls were living in a displacement setting after being forced to flee their homes. The needs are immense and ever-growing, yet funding is failing to reach those who are most in need of protection and services. At the same time, the way in which decisions are being made is becoming less and less clear from the perspective of international, national, and local organizations. And we’re seeing more and more pushback and failure to meet commitments related to localization [shifting power and resources from international entities to local responders], along with a hyper-prioritization of funding that is not always rooted in evidence.
This moment calls for better understanding the needs of women and girls in displacement and making decisions accordingly. There is a plethora of data out there at so many different levels, from community-level data, to programmatic data that different organizations gather, to population-level data that governments or UN agencies collect, to rapid needs assessments that are conducted at the onset of an emergency.
All of these sources of data are incredibly important. They can help us make better decisions, but they are not readily accessible to all decision-makers. What we’ve heard repeatedly in the last five years or so is a real need to bring together
these sources of data to get a clearer picture of the needs, priorities, and characteristics of women and girls who are displaced. So, that’s what we are doing.
RF: Does that mean that no one is crunching the numbers or analyzing the data holistically?
JD: Correct. This makes it very difficult not only to get the overarching picture, but also to make any comparisons across time and across settings. By bringing together all the existing data from the different sources, what we hope to achieve is not only to provide a clearer picture, but also to make the case for why investing in women and girls in displacement contexts is so critical and, in fact, lifesaving, as well as how to best invest the limited resources that we now have.
RF: So how is the white paper the first step in that process?
JD: The white paper really takes a bird’s eye view of what evidence and data currently exists. What is the state of the evidence on women and girls in displacement? What do we know, and where are the critical gaps? Before trying to
move forward in this initiative where we are going to compile different sources of data, we need to know what’s out there, right? We need to know who is producing what data, what different indicators are being measured, where the data is coming from geographically, and then we can assess how to move forward in creating a framework that can measure and monitor the state of women and girls in displacement.
RF: What are the biggest takeaways from the paper?
JD: The paper was written based on key informant interviews with more than 25 leading experts in gender equality, global displacement, and humanitarian response—including policymakers, researchers, practitioners, and women impacted by displacement. A major takeaway from those interviews is that there’s an immense interest in, and commitment to, creating a standardized framework for monitoring the state of women and girls in displacement. There is a really broad consensus that this is a critical gap we need to fill, and that we need this data to make the right decisions so that we can most effectively reach women and girls in displacement.
Another big takeaway is that there is already a commitment at the global level to collect this data—including for the Sustainable Development Goals. So now the question is, how do we make a really strong case for investing in it? Because that’s where the gap is: between commitment and funding.
RF: With that in mind, how are you going to use this paper to build momentum for next steps?
JD: The white paper identifies the data that exists as well as the data that’s missing, and it looks beyond the data, to the commitments that have been made at the national and global levels to utilize the data for decision-making. And so, it illustrates that there is a real need for this initiative—and then it takes the first step in considering what type of data, what indicators, would be most effective in measuring the state of women and girls in displacement. We want to make sure that the framework is useful to decision-makers, and the white paper really sets us up to do that.
RF: What is the purpose of doing research like this? How does it fuel advocacy, and how can it otherwise make an impact?
JD: We can’t change what we don’t understand. In this case, we can’t meaningfully respond to the needs of women and girls anywhere in the world without the right data.
The second purpose is to make the case for why we focus specifically on women and girls in displacement. Oftentimes in our work, we get the question of why we don’t focus on all displaced people, since men and boys have acute needs, too. In compiling and analyzing this data, we will be able to showcase the difference between the lives of women and girls versus men and boys in displacement, and that will really help make the case for targeted investment in women and girls. This is especially important right now, when there is such a global backlash to gender equality and strong rhetoric against DEI.
Another essential purpose is showing the real costs of displacement on women and girls. In the Democratic Republic of Congo for example, we can compare the livelihoods, education, and other key indicators for women and girls in the eastern provinces, where there is mass displacement, with women and girls in other parts of the country that are less impacted. So, there’s an opportunity to provide evidence to reinforce the argument that displacement really disrupts women and girls’ lives in a way that is not always measured but that still needs specific policies to address it.
RF: What are you most excited about in terms of this project’s potential?
JD: For so long, I have personally struggled to find reliable, useable data on women and girls in humanitarian settings. Data is so dispersed, and even worse, data is often collected but not utilized, which is really a disservice to the efforts made to collect it and to the communities that participate in the research. I’m most excited to pull in all the existing data in a way that makes it accessible and that helps various stakeholders make the case for investing in women and girls in displacement contexts.
RF: Why is WRC best positioned for this project?
JD: For more than 35 years, WRC has been a global leader on research on women and girls in displacement. We were the first organization to really shine a light on these issues through rigorous evidence generation and to insist that advocacy, programs, and policies were informed by data and evidence. We also work as a convener at the global level, so this project, which takes a high-level view and aims to inform global policy and practice, is really perfect for us.
RF: What should our readers look for in the coming months, as this project progresses?
JD: In the coming months, we are working closely with an expert advisory group made up of 13 leading experts in the fields of gender equality and humanitarian response. We are working with them to create and validate an indicator framework to be used to monitor the state of women and girls in displacement. We’ll be publishing a think piece on that towards the end of the year, and we will be launching a flagship report for the initiative in March of 2027.
Thank you, Julianne, for helping our readers understand this important initiative!