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2024 Annual Report

A Letter from Sarah

For 35 years, the Women’s Refugee Commission (WRC) has played a crucial role in advancing gender equality and reshaping humanitarian and displacement policy and practice to better meet the needs of women, children, youth, and other overlooked, undervalued, and underserved people displaced by crisis and conflict.

Gender equality and inclusion anchors our work and is our North Star. WRC directly contributes to the advancement of Sustainable Development Goal 5, achieving gender equality and empowering all women and girls.

Our engagement with individuals and communities directly affected by conflict, crisis, and displacement ensures that our programs and advocacy are informed by and closely connected to their needs and aspirations. This approach is not just a strategic choice; it reflects our founding commitment to place the experiences and agency of women, children, and youth at the center of everything we do.

Strategic partnerships are key to WRC’s approach. We collaborate with a diverse range of partners, including government officials, the UN, civil society organizations, women- and refugee-led organizations, the media, and supporters to expand our reach and maximize our impact. Through partnerships, WRC amplifies insights gained from local communities and scales best practices, shares evidence, provides technical assistance, and influences decision-making. Our approach ensures that local priorities shape global policies and practices and contribute to informed collective action.

WRC works within the peace and security, humanitarian, and development sectors to advance gender equality and rights-based policies. The rollback of women’s rights in many parts of the world, including access to the full range of sexual and reproductive health services, has had an enormous impact on forcibly displaced women and girls. We stand alongside crisis-affected people to remove barriers and uphold fundamental rights. We elevate the experience, expertise, and recommendations of women, children, youth, and other marginalized people and listen carefully to their needs, goals, and solutions.

We address the complex and often hidden needs of refugee women and girls and other vulnerable displaced people. With your support, WRC will continue to lift their voices and help them meet their needs, build on their strengths, find sustainable solutions to the challenges they face, and have the support and skills they need to provide for themselves and their families.

Because of your commitment:

  • Survivors of gender-based violence are rebuilding their lives.
  • Displaced women and girls have access to lifesaving reproductive health care.
  • Refugee youth have a voice in shaping their futures.
  • Humanitarian aid is becoming more inclusive and effective.

WRC plays a crucial role in advocating for gender equality and reshaping policy and practice to better meet the needs of women and girls displaced by violence, conflict, and crises. Our engagement with individuals and communities directly affected by crisis ensures that our programs and advocacy are informed by and are closely connected to their needs and aspirations. This approach reflects our founding commitment to place the experiences, leadership, and agency of women and girls at the center of everything we do and to promote more equitable, inclusive, and sustainable approaches.

Thank you for all you do to support our work to serve, to protect, and to empower refugee women and girls.

Our Vision

Our vision is a world where all people displaced by conflict or crisis are welcomed with dignity; are safe, healthy, and self-reliant; have their human rights and agency respected; and get the support and resources they need to rebuild their lives.

Our Mission

Our mission is to improve the lives and protect the rights of women, children, youth, and other people who are often overlooked, undervalued, and underserved in humanitarian responses to displacement and crises.

How We Work

We work in partnership with displaced communities to research their needs, identify solutions, and advocate for gender-transformative and sustained improvement in humanitarian, development, and displacement policy and practice.

The Next Five Years: A New Vision

As conflicts and crises continue to displace people worldwide and displacement becomes increasingly prolonged, meeting the basic needs and ensuring the fundamental human rights of refugees becomes even more challenging.

Business-as-usual approaches are failing displaced women and girls. Addressing the future requires transformative change in humanitarian and development policy and practice. In anticipation of known risks, we must increase the agency and resilience of displaced women, children, and youth to prevent, prepare for, respond to, and recover from crises. The situation calls for the rapid development and adoption of innovative, evidence-based approaches, with local voices taking the lead in prioritizing resources and programming and driving solutions.

To help tackle these challenges, the Women’s Refugee Commission’s 2025–2030 strategic plan outlines our commitment to using evidence-based approaches and advocacy to ensure gender equality is appropriately addressed in the context of displacement. The plan details our aims to improve humanitarian practice, including resource allocation, and to advocate for policies that respect the rights of displaced people.

Our strategic priorities:

  • We will inform and influence emergency responses to be more gender responsive.
  • We will improve the quality of humanitarian programming and practice for the most overlooked and underserved crisis-affected populations, with a particular focus on women and girls.
  • We will achieve equitable and just systems, policies, and practices that respect the rights of women and girls and other overlooked groups who are affected by crisis and displaced.

Read our 2025–2030 strategic plan.

Emergency Response: Listening to the Voices of Sudanese Women

Since April 2023, Sudan has been embroiled in a severe conflict that has displaced 11 million people within the country, while another 2 million have fled to neighboring countries. The crisis has had a devastating impact on women and girls, who face heightened risks of violence and economic hardship. Yet women and girls are resilient and are working to support their families and their communities. Their stories of leadership, innovation, and organizing, however, are seldom heard.

To amplify these voices, the Women’s Refugee Commission partnered with the Sudan Family Planning Association and the Gender in Emergencies Group to gather stories from women in the grip of the conflict. These narratives—from mothers, grandmothers, nurses, teachers, students, and community workers aged from 18 to over 70—form the body of our report, In Her Own Words: Voices of Sudan.

We shared the women’s stories through various platforms, including social media, publications, and events, to raise awareness and foster solidarity with Sudanese women.

“I hope to fill the emptiness inside me and to improve our circumstances. I want to instill beautiful values in the children and help rebuild our country for the next generation. Change starts with women.” – B.H.F., government employee

I’m Here: Giving Adolescent Girls a Chance for a Better Future

Adolescents, especially adolescent girls, are frequently marginalized and overlooked by humanitarian actors. They often lack access to sexual and reproductive health information and services, opportunities to develop critical skills for future employment, and the chance to develop social networks. Moreover, their voices are generally not included in the development of programs meant to benefit them.

To address these issues, WRC developed the I’m Here approach in 2016. This set of guidelines helps humanitarian organizations identify where adolescent girls live, understand their needs, and assess the availability of services and resources for them. The I’m Here approach serves as an entry point to engage directly with adolescent girls themselves to develop programs to improve their safety, health, and well-being from the first days of a crisis.

In 2024, we worked with Tiempo de Juego (TdJ), a youth development organization based in Colombia, to implement I’m Here in Santa Marta. Santa Marta is home to a large number of Venezuelan migrants and Colombians affected by the decades-long civil conflict.

As a result of our partnership, TdJ identified more than 150 girls aged 10 to19 who were previously unknown to them. Information gathered in a household survey will guide future engagement and ensure that programs are better tailored to meet the needs of adolescent girls, including girls cohabiting with a partner and those with children.

“This process is particularly significant because, for the first time, we’re applying a scientific method to measure the impact of an intervention or programming with these characteristics. We now have a baseline for Santa Marta and Cienaga, supported by a set of rigorous tools, and we’re set to measure the outcomes effectively.

“What’s especially exciting is that this isn’t just about data. It’s about how the data informs our program design in combination with active participation from the community. It’s been incredibly rewarding to begin working—or rather, to enhance our work—in such a collaborative and evidence-driven way.”

— Camilo Isaza, TdJ

Emergency Response

Listening to the Voices of Sudanese Women

Since April 2023, Sudan has been embroiled in a severe conflict that has displaced 11 million people within the country, while another 2 million have fled to neighboring countries. The crisis has had a devastating impact on women and girls, who face heightened risks of violence and economic hardship. Yet women and girls are resilient and are working to support their families and their communities. Their stories of leadership, innovation, and organizing, however, are seldom heard.

To amplify these voices, the Women’s Refugee Commission partnered with the Sudan Family Planning Association and the Gender in Emergencies Group to gather stories from women in the grip of the conflict. These narratives—from mothers, grandmothers, nurses, teachers, students, and community workers aged from 18 to over 70—form the body of our report, In Her Own Words: Voices of Sudan.

We shared the women’s stories through various platforms, including social media, publications, and events, to raise awareness and foster solidarity with Sudanese women.

“I hope to fill the emptiness inside me and to improve our circumstances. I want to instill beautiful values in the children and help rebuild our country for the next generation. Change starts with women.” – B.H.F., government employee

Coalitions hosted/co-led by WRC

The Global Campaign for Equal Nationality Rights (GCENR)* works with organizations and activists around the world to fight for nationality laws that provide women with the same right as men to pass their nationality on to their children and spouses and to acquire, change, and retain their nationality without discrimination.

In December 2024, the Campaign organized the Global Multistakeholder Summit on Advancing Gender Equality in Nationality Laws in Geneva, in partnership with Equality Now, the InterParliamentary Union, the UN Refugee Agency, and UN Women. The Summit was the first-ever global-level convening of parliamentarians, government and UN officials, and representatives from civil society on ending gender discrimination in nationality laws. Participants included high-level representatives from 15 countries impacted by gender-discriminatory nationality laws.

The Summit, empowered essential stakeholders to work together to strategize, build partnerships, and propose roadmaps to enact reforms to enshrine gender-equal nationality rights.

To build on momentum achieved through the Summit, GCENR is supporting civil society coalition members to implement national advocacy campaigns, with material and technical resources from GCENR. The Campaign will work with Summit government attendees to raise awareness among a wider group of policymakers on the benefits of enacting reforms.

 “I will share everything that I learned here with other parliamentarians and sensitize the rest of parliament…. I leave here a champion and when I get back home, I want to talk with parliamentarians and say this is not only something that affects women and men, but also our children.”

– Lindiwe Thulile Dlamini, President of the Senate of Eswatini

“What made this Summit unique was the opportunity for MPs and CSOs [civil society organizations] to sit in the same room, engaging directly on how to address the issue of gender-equal nationality laws. This kind of partnership is essential if we are to move forward. There is no one-size-fits-all solution, but fostering trust and open dialogue between governments and CSOs is the first crucial step.”
– Deepti Gurung, Co-Founder Citizenship Affected Peoples Network and 2023 WRC Voices of Courage and Nansen Asia Pacific Awardee

Learn more about the Global Campaign for Equal Nationality Rights – https://www.equalnationalityrights.org/

* The Global Campaign was founded and is hosted by the Women’s Refugee Commission.

The Global Refugee Youth Network (GRYN) is a global network of refugee youth leaders who work together globally to support young refugees to take action locally in their communities. GRYN was co-founded by and is housed at the Women’s Refugee Commission.

At the Summit of the Future in September 2024, GRYN co-hosted the high-level dialogue “Young Refugees’ Participation, Leadership, and Self-Reliance: The Future We Cannot Afford to Ignore.” Event partners included the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Netherlands, UNICEF, UNHCR, WRC, and ILO.

The dialogue showcased how meaningful youth participation drives sustainable solutions and secured commitments to invest in education, skills development, and youth-led initiatives. Participants emphasized the importance of partnering with refugee youth organizations and breaking barriers to economic inclusion, reaffirming our pledge to center refugee youth leadership in global solutions.

Learn more about GRYN – https://www.gryn.network/

The Refugee Self-Reliance Initiative (RSRI) is a multi-stakeholder initiative co-founded in 2015 by the Women’s Refugee Commission and RefugePoint. The initiative aims to support refugee innovation, talent, and earning potential, empowering refugees to rebuild their lives with dignity and independence. The RSRI is built on three key pillars: learning, programming, and policy and advocacy, all designed to drive systemic change and create a world where refugees can shape their own futures through opportunity and inclusion.

In 2024, the RSRI achieved significant milestones and continued to advance its work toward refugee self-reliance. A central focus of this work is strengthening the evidence base around programs that effectively promote self-reliance. In this regard, WRC, Washington University, HIAS, and Universidad de los Andes partnered under the RSRI framework to conduct a study. This research examines the relationship between household-level self-reliance and mental health outcomes among forcibly displaced women in Colombia. This study is an important step in understanding and enhancing the impact of self-reliance programs on the well-being of refugees.

This is a big deal because it is building a robust research base about what works and doesn’t for self-reliance and the impact it has in people’s lives. Most of what we have up to this point is anecdotal.

In year 2 of the study, we will be able to measure change overtime.

Financial Report

Board Chair

  • Alexandra Arriaga

Board of Directors

  • Heather Beckman
  • Adela Cristina Coman
  • Sarah Costa (ex-officio)
  • Ivonne Dersch
  • Maddy Dwertman
  • Catherine LaCour
  • Lady Trish Malloch-Brown
  • Michele A. Manatt
  • Bradford McGann
  • Leila Rassekh Milani, JD, MA
  • Michelle Noyes
  • Yen Pottinger
  • Joanna Pozen
  • Nandana Dev Sen
  • Foni Joyce Vuni
  • Berkeley Warburton

Commissioners

  • Susan Stark Alberti
  • Sherrell Andrews
  • Liz Appel
  • Analisa Leonor Balares
  • Zrinka Bralo
  • Dawn Calabia
  • Katharine I. Crost
  • Elizabeth L. Daniels
  • Julie Daum
  • Terence Dougherty
  • Elizabeth Ferris
  • Mimi Frankel
  • Peggy Goldwyn
  • Barbara Hack
  • Susan Jonas
  • Jurate Kazickas
  • Sarah Kovner
  • Susan F. Martin
  • Rukshan Mistry
  • Dr. Susan Gana Okonkwo
  • Carmen O’Shea
  • Jane Olson
  • Hazel Reitz
  • Debbie Welch Rosenberg
  • Nancy Rubin
  • Dora B. Schriro
  • Jill Schuker
  • Josie Sentner
  • Catherine Shimony
  • Mori Taheripour
  • Anne Tatlock
  • Deborah Tolman
  • Sandra Sennett Tully
  • Carrie Welch
  • Sakena Yacoobi