Category Archives: Charities/Nonprofit

03.24.21
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Asian Americans build community solutions in face of hate

Credit: Chinese Progressive Association

This story first appeared on Al Jazeera

It’s 8:45am and Sakhone Lasaphangthong is walking through Oakland’s Chinatown district, waving hello to business owners opening up shop and greeting locals on their way to work.

Five days a week, Sakhone drives more than 80 miles (128km) from his Sacramento home for a 6-9am shift as a community ambassador. Even before he starts his day job as director of housing for a local nonprofit, Sakhone checks in with merchants, escorts older residents on errands, and sweeps the streets.

The Chinatown Community Ambassadors programme is not new; it was established in 2017 by local groups to provide added safety resources and services to the community that are culturally sensitive.

But Sakhone, a refugee originally from Laos, says it has become increasingly important to Oakland’s Asian-American residents following a year of attacks and racist graffiti on shop windows and walls.

“My job, especially right now, is to be hyper-vigilant, being aware of people coming here trying to do harm or looking for an easy victim,” the 45-year-old says.

Anti-Asian attacks

Even before the recent attacks on three separate North Georgia massage businesses by a white gunman left eight people dead, including six Asian women, Asian Americans in the Bay Area, which encompasses Oakland and San Francisco, were feeling under threat.

More than 1.7 million Asian Americans live in the Bay Area, accounting for about a quarter of the region’s total population, and making it one of the largest Asian-American communities in the US.

Among the incidents so far this year in Oakland’s Chinatown, a 16 square-block area that is home to approximately 3,000 people, a 91-year-old man was shoved to the ground last month and hospitalised with serious injuries and a 52-year-old woman was seriously injured after she was shot in the head with a flare gun in January.

Charges of assault and battery and elder abuse were brought in the former case, and assault with a deadly weapon in the latter.

Some activists and politicians ascribe the anti-Asian violence to the rhetoric used by former US President Trump and others, blaming China for the COVID-19 pandemic and referring to the coronavirus as the “China virus”.

Since the pandemic began last year, thousands of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPI) have experienced racist verbal abuse, physical attacks or microaggressions. According to a new report by a Bay Area-based monitoring group, Stop AAPI Hate, 3,795 incidents occurred nationwide between March 2020 and February 2021.

California accounted for almost half of the reported cases described in the report, and 700 were in the Bay Area alone. Businesses were by far the most common site of discrimination, followed by public streets and public parks, while online incidents accounted for about 10 percent of the reported incidents, the report found.

More than two-thirds of people were subjected to verbal harassment; one in five had experienced shunning – deliberate avoidance based on race. Women were also more than twice as likely to report hate incidents than men and many described being sexually harassed.

Community efforts

Oakland’s popular ambassador programme stems from a scheme for formerly incarcerated individuals like Sakhone, but lacks long-term funding. He is currently the only ambassador.

The Oakland Chinatown Coalition hopes to remedy that by next year by making it part of a Community Benefits District, which levies additional taxes on local property owners to fund improvements to their neighbourhood.

Meanwhile, several volunteer efforts have popped up during the past year in response to the hate attacks, particularly by younger Asian Americans. They include Compassion in Oakland, which currently has hundreds of volunteers who will chaperone anyone in Chinatown who requests help, as well as provide free translation or interpreting services. The group is also offering help to other cities interested in setting up a similar project.

Building trust is crucial to the success of these programmes, but challenges exist.

“I think there are a lot of challenges with language barriers between folks who are trying to help, and the people they’re trying to serve,” said Alvina Wong, campaign and organising director at the Asian Pacific Environmental Network in Oakland.

“I think the challenge is no one really knows who to trust. Everyone is just living in fear and anxiety,” she told Al Jazeera.

Wong said COVID-19 restrictions have curbed opportunities to build trust through community meetings and town halls, for example. “The digital divide is very real,” she says. “It is just so limiting because so many people can’t even get on Zoom, let alone be in a Zoom space with interpretation.”

One solution is working with community health partners to directly reach out to families who are survivors of violence and crime, she said.

Beyond policing

After the Atlanta attacks, San Francisco police last week bolstered patrols in neighbourhoods with high numbers of Asian-American residents, businesses and visitors, including Chinatown and the Sunset and Richmond districts.But Lai Wa Wu, policy and alliance director with the Chinese Progressive Association (CPA) that organised an anti-hate crime vigil on Saturday in San Francisco, warned against relying on policing to address the problem.

“We understand that in moments of stress, people naturally will revert to solutions or systems that they feel they know,” she said.

“We also believe that policing cannot and is not the only solution to creating real safety for our communities. We need to understand what is the real culprit of inequities and harm. We need victim services that are culturally responsive. We need to have trained bystander intervention programmes. We need to more fully resource our communities.”

The Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Atlanta advocacy group echoed the CPA’s stance in a recent statement, rejecting increased police presence or carceral solutions as the answers to hate crimes.

Instead, the group said assessing and addressing communities’ immediate needs should be the priority, which could include in-language support for mental health, legal, employment and immigration services.

Government responses

Meanwhile, various levels of government have sought to address the problem.

The district attorney’s office in Alameda County, which is home to Oakland, has set up a special response unit focused on anti-Asian crimes, particularly against elders. The unit includes prosecutors and members of the Oakland Asian community who can speak to victims in their native languages; all are fluent in Cantonese and Mandarin.

California state legislator David Chiu introduced a bill last month that would require the California Department of Justice (DOJ) to establish a toll-free hotline, as well as an online reporting system, to report hate crimes and hate incidents. Similar hotlines have been established in other states and parts of California, including San Francisco and Alameda County.

“Having a centralised, statewide approach to tracking hate crimes within a law enforcement agency will make all of our communities in California safer,” Chiu said in a statement.

The first Congressional hearing since 1987 on anti-Asian hate began last week, at which Asian-American lawmakers declared the US had reached “a crisis point that cannot be ignored”, as the community “has been screaming out for help”.

Back in Oakland, Sakhone’s work with housing nonprofit Family Bridges is helping connect Chinatown’s homeless population with local merchants by involving them in graffiti removal work. He says it is a small step towards strengthening the community by building trust and fostering a more caring attitude.

“It’s not fair that a lot of refugees and immigrants escaped a war-torn country, come to America to build a better life for them and their family, and to just be brutally murdered for no reason than them being Asian, is senseless,” Sakhone says.

“We need to stop that senseless violence here in America.”

07.07.16
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Giving Girls a Second Chance at Education

This article first appeared on the Women & Girls Hub from News Deeply

A fast-track learning program in India is being scaled up to help 3 million young girls across developing countries stay in school. Udaan, a residential school for students aged 11-14, helps girls study instead of work or marry.

Teacher Maheshwari Verma (back left) works with Maya, 11, during language class at the Udaan Accelerated Learning Camp for girls near Hardoi, India, on Sept. 9, 2014. Photo by Erin Lubin/CARE

As the oldest of five children, 15-year-old Laxmi Pal grew up caring for her siblings and doing household chores in the rural Indian village of Kodanna in Uttar Pradesh, while her mother was out cleaning houses and her father struggled to find seasonal work on farms. But three years ago, Laxmi became the first member of her immediate family to attend school. Nine months later, she graduated from fifth grade and enrolled in a government secondary school to continue her education.

Like many adolescent girls growing up in rural India who never start or finish primary school, Laxmi envisaged a future of domestic work and early marriage. But instead, she was given a second chance at education through a fast-track learning course run by nonprofit organization CARE.

CARE’s Udaan program (Udaan means “to soar” in Hindi) compresses several years of primary school curriculum into nine months of accelerated learning. Launched in India in 1999, the Udaan residential school offers girls aged 11-14 the chance to quickly complete their education. The program is highly interactive, featuring learning by doing, educational games and group projects to keep the students engaged.

In addition to teaching language, math and environmental science, Udaan teachers help girls learn to question discriminatory practices and beliefs within their villages. Teachers also integrate activities such as morning assembly, where girls gather before class to recite poems, sing songs and perform skits. In their free time, girls play sports and learn to ride bicycles. (The latter is a skill that’s especially important, since the distance to schools is a major hindrance to girls’ education in rural India.)

Students of the Udaan Girls School work on a group exercise. The curriculum includes language, math and environmental science. Udaan teachers also interweave activities such as morning assembly, sports (volleyball, soccer), bicycle riding and computer skills. (Allen Clinton/CARE)

Students of the Udaan Girls School work on a group exercise. The curriculum includes language, math and environmental science. Udaan teachers also interweave activities such as morning assembly, sports (volleyball, soccer), bicycle riding and computer skills. (Allen Clinton/CARE)

Since CARE started Udaan with local partner Sarvodaya Ashram, more than 95 percent of the girls enrolled have passed the fifth-grade exam. Since 2011, the Udaan model has been rolled out to Odisha and Bihar states; in 2013, an Udaan school opened in theMewat district in Haryana state, approximately two hours from Delhi.

According to CARE, just one year of secondary education correlates to a 15 to 25 percent increase in future wages for young women.

At the United State of Women Summit in June, CARE announced a$15 million rollout of the Udaan Second Chances program as part of the U.S. government’s Let Girls Learn initiative. Launched by President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama in March 2015, the initiative is aimed at the estimated 62 million girls globally – half of them adolescents – who are not in school.

Over the next five years, the Udaan program will expand to reach 3 million girls across Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Malawi, Mali, Nepal, Pakistan and Somalia. The program is supported by the U.S. government, ministries of education in individual countries, corporations, foundations and local partner organizations.

CARE argues that when girls are educated, all of society benefits. “Girls who attend school tend to delay marriage and pregnancy, are less vulnerable to disease, and are more likely to increase their own earning power for life,” said Joyce Adolwa, CARE’s director of girls’ empowerment, at the United State of Women Summit.

Brian Feagans, director of communications at CARE, says the program seeks to address lack of access to a relevant education for adolescent girls who are out of school or at risk of dropping out. “It helps them catch up through accelerated learning models and then transitions them back into schools at higher primary or lower secondary levels,” he says. “This is a comprehensive package of interventions that converge around education to create an integrated approach to girls’ empowerment.”

Udaan schools have been deliberately placed in the most disadvantaged areas, where the educational status, particularly for girls, is extremely low. Using the successful results of this model, CARE has advocated for the Indian government to adapt the Udaan curriculum into its state-run schools. Government teachers have been trained on the Udaan approach. This scale-up has helped change the future trajectory of thousands of girls, says Feagans.

Having been through the program, Laxmi now dreams of becoming a teacher. “If I didn’t go to Udaan, I would have been cleaning houses with my mom and soon married off,” she says. “Being at Udaan allowed me to dream about my future for the first time.”

 

07.06.16
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The App Helping Africa’s Midwives Save Lives

This article first appeared on the Women & Girls Hub from News Deeply

A mobile health project in Ethiopia gives any health worker with a smartphone access to the information they need to deal with emergencies during childbirth. Now it’s being scaled up to reach 10,000 health workers across Africa and Southeast Asia by 2017.

A midwife at Gimbi Health Center in West Wellega, Ethiopia, uses the Safe Delivery App to help her carry out an examination on a patient. Photo by Mulugeta Wolde

For Ethiopian mother Mitike Birhanu, the birth of her twins almost ended in tragedy. She was unconscious when the second of her babies was delivered, and the newborn seemed lifeless. But her midwife quickly consulted an app on her smartphone, diagnosed the problems, and used emergency procedures to save both Mitike’s life and that of her child.

Every year, over 300,000 women globally die from pregnancy-related causes, and over 5 million babies die during birth or within the first weeks of their lives. Yet the vast majority of maternal and newborn deaths could be prevented if health workers attending births had better emergency skills and knowledge.

Many health workers in low- or middle-income countries work in environments where there is no electricity or running water. But one thing they do have is smartphones.

The Safe Delivery App (SDA) was created as a simple tool for health workers such as midwives and nurses to access basic emergency obstetric and neonatal care skills. Developed by Danish NGO Maternity Foundation in collaboration with the University of Southern Denmark and the University of Copenhagen, the app aims to train and instruct birth attendants on how to manage potentially fatal complications during pregnancy and childbirth.

Based on global clinical guidelines, the SDA contains four basic features: animated instruction videos, action cards, a drug list and practical procedure instructions. The five- to seven-minute videos teach lifesaving skills such as how to stop a woman bleeding after birth or how to resuscitate a newborn. When there is no time to watch the full video, the action cards give clear, essential recommendations and immediate care information – such as how to mix an alcohol-based hand rub.

The SDA is free to download from Google Play and the App Store. And it can be preinstalled on phones, so once it’s downloaded, users don’t need a network connection or internet access to view the videos or other features.

Meaza Semaw, project coordinator at the Ethiopian Midwives Association, says the app is ideal for places like Ethiopia, where women’s access to quality maternal health services is challenging, especially if they experience complications in birth. “The Safe Delivery App is a great tool to improve maternal health in Ethiopia. Most midwives, if not all, have a mobile phone, so accessibility is very high,” she says. “The app is easy to use because it is supported by animations and videos. In addition, it uses local languages.”

With the support of the MSD for Mothers program, the first four of the app’s 10 videos were tested in a one-year, randomized controlled trial across 78 facilities in Ethiopia during 2014. Results show users’ skills in handling most common complications such as postpartum hemorrhage and newborn resuscitation more than doubled after 12 months of using the app.

The app was officially launched in April 2015, and a year later was chosen by the Women Deliver conference as an example of how a partnership-based innovation can help end maternal and newborn mortality. SDA is now currently in use in Kenya, with plans to roll out to Guinea, Sierra Leone, Myanmar, Laos and India in the coming months.

So far, the app has been funded with help from over $50,000 in donations through an Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign, and Maternity Foundation is working with partners in individual countries to fund the translation and rollout of the app. The hope is to be able to fulfill the commitment Maternity Foundation made to the U.N.’s Every Woman Every Child to reach 10,000 health workers with the app by the end of 2017, so ensuring a safer birth for 1 million women.

At Wollega University in Ethiopia, student midwives use the app during training. (Mulugeta Wolde)At Wollega University in Ethiopia, student midwives use the app during training. (Mulugeta Wolde)

Maternity Foundation CEO Anna Frellsen says the organization is working in partnership with governments, midwives’ associations and larger NGOs to achieve its goal. “We really want to see the app integrated as part of the existing health system in countries, and we are starting to engage with the [health] ministries and stakeholders in each country to find out how it can be used and adapted,” she says.

The Ethiopian Midwives Association is currently working on integrating the SDA into its ongoing training program. Frellsen hopes other health organizations in participating countries will do likewise.

There is also a new version of the app in the works, which will feature quizzes and a test (rewarded by a certificate) to “push” learning to the user and make the experience more interactive.

Frellsen says one of the key components of Maternity Foundation’s “backbone” support for its partners will be disseminating learning around the SDA and mobile health in general. “We are looking at how we can publish some of the learning for sharing with others who would like to use the app, but also more broadly as a case for how to scale up an mHealth [mobile health] tool,” she says.

In western Ethiopia’s Gimbi rural district, the midwife who saved Mitike’s life says the Safe Delivery App has already made her better at her job. “I am confident that from what I have learned from the app, I can stop [a mother] bleeding,” says Yane Ababaw. “I can save her life.”

06.02.16
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After the Nepal Earthquake, Weaving Brings Wealth

One year on from a devastating earthquake, a group of young Nepalese women are using an age-old craft as a new way to support their families and boost the local economy.

Ramita Gole (left) and Nirmala Lungeli Magar from the Panchakanya group. Photo by UNDP/Rapid Enterprise and Livelihood Recovery Project (RELRP)

 

Belimaya Ginel Magar and a handful of other young women from the village of Kapilakot in southeastern Nepal had just finished a training course in traditional Dhaka cloth weaving when the worst earthquake in the country’s recent history struck on April 25, 2015.

The 7.8-magnitude quake flattened the women’s village. But Belimaya and her fellow weavers refused to let the disaster quash their dreams of using their new skills to earn a living. One year on, their Panchakanya Micro Entrepreneurs Group is among the hundreds of new and thriving small businesses helping to regenerate Nepal’s economy.

Last year’s earthquake and subsequent aftershocks in central Nepal left around 9,000 people dead, more than 22,000 injured and millions homeless. There was significant damage to small enterprises and markets – up to 90 percent in the most affected areas, with small farms, artisanal products and tourism services among the worst hit.

Belimaya and her coworkers from the Dhamile Village Development Committee (VDC) of Sindhuli District are among the more than 80 percent of Nepal’s population living in rural areas. Income-earning opportunities are scarce, which has resulted in a huge exodus of the productive workforce – predominantly young men – to India, the Gulf states and beyond. Women (along with children and older people) remain in the villages and are responsible for taking care of their families.

Belimaya, 26, cares for her two elementary-school-age children while her husband works in Qatar. Before the earthquake, she was excited to hear about the chance to learn a new income-earning skill through the Micro-Enterprise Development Programme(MEDEP) – a scheme set up in 1998 by the government of Nepal and the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and currently funded by the Australian government to encourage employment opportunities.

“One year back, we did not have any skills to make money. We had plenty of leisure time after sending the kids to school,” Belimaya said. “The training to make Dhaka clothes came as an opportunity to start a business. The training boosted our confidence to set up the microenterprise. We believed that this business would change our life.”

For centuries, Nepal’s craftspeople have woven the pure cotton cloth known as Dhaka. Still produced by hand loom with traditional designs, modern Dhaka is used to create everything from saris and shirts to bed sheets and table mats. This unique weaving style is one of Nepal’s most recognizable and commercially popular handicrafts.

Belimaya was among a group of 10 women to embark on a three-month weaving training course run by MEDEP in 2015, beginning just before the earthquake and ending when the frequent aftershocks subsided.

When the earthquake struck, she and four fellow trainees were in the process of setting up a weaving workshop. “The quake fully damaged our bamboo-made cottage [workshop],” said Belimaya, now chair of the Panchakanya group. “A few weeks after the earthquake, we rebuilt a makeshift [one].”

But as their homes were far from the workshop, Belimaya and her colleagues were spending an entire day traveling to their new workplace. “So we decided to rent around Kapilakot,” she said. “We had to leave home and shift to a new place, along with children. But we were determined to do this.”

And that was not the only challenge that these women faced. “Disbelief upon our initiative… was most discouraging for us,” said Belimaya, referring to the reaction from local people to the group’s devotion to building the workshop and starting a business.

 

Weavers had to build a bamboo house to create a workshop in their village. (UNDP Nepal)Weavers had to build a bamboo house to create a workshop in their village. (UNDP Nepal)

When villagers saw these women – most of whom were under 25 at the time – cutting and laying bamboo, digging small holes and fixing sticks, they presumed that they were building homes for earthquake victims or constructing poultry farms.

“Initially, nobody believed in us. Many men assumed that we girls would not be able to build a cottage by ourselves. They said we were wasting our time. But we showed them,” said Suntali Maya Ghalan, another member of the Panchakanya group.

The women began building their bamboo cottage in October 2015. Within a week, they had built a modest cottage with a tarpaulin roof, at a cost of 1,500 Nepalese rupees ($14) funded by the VDC office and a local cooperative. This inspired three more women to join the group, bringing the total to eight members.

Through the Rapid Enterprise and Livelihoods Recovery Project(RELRP), another UNDP-administered scheme funded by the Australian government and launched in June 2015, the Panchakanya group received a week-long Dhaka weaving refresher course. Three members visited Tanahun District in central Nepal for an additional three-month advanced weaving course, funded in part by the Nepal government’s program for small business regeneration.

The group funded and set up seven manual weaving machines before formally launching their enterprise in October 2015. Their products – sold at local markets – include kurtas (traditional loose shirts), handkerchiefs, coverlets, hats, shawls, blouses and ties. Members invest their profits to scale up their business and have started a monthly savings program with a local cooperative.

Belimaya is delighted with Panchakanya’s success, which has seen the group grow to 25 active members who each receive an income of around $90 to $140 per month from sales of their Dhaka products.

“The amount covers most of the expenses of our daily life. We pay rent, fulfill daily needs and pay our children’s school fees as well,” said Belimaya, adding that the enterprise has earned members respect from their husbands and other family members.

“These women have shown such promise within such a short time,” said Indra Hyau, district coordinator of RELRP in Sindhuli. “RELRP is currently supporting the construction of a common facility center for them to work in a safer environment. We are very impressed with their dedication.”

Over 8,000 women have been able to restart their businesses through the support of UNDP/RELRP and 1,400 new women entrepreneurs have been created, earning as much as $90 per month.

With Nepal’s youth unemployment at an all-time high, self-sufficient entrepreneurs such as the Panchakanya members are role models for others in their village.

“Those who were discouraging us in the beginning were curious to send their daughters to our enterprise for learning. Now, the villagers extend support towards us and treat us with respect. We hope that more women will join us and more women will be empowered in the remote villages,” Belimaya said.

“Today, we don’t have to wait for our husbands to send money from the Gulf countries. We are able to manage on our own.”

 

05.30.16
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The Quiet Crisis of Europe’s Pregnant Refugees

This article first appeared on the Women & Girls Hub from News Deeply

Around one in 10 women refugees traveling through Europe is pregnant. Better coordinated approaches from states and NGOs are urgently needed to keep women and their newborn babies safe and well.

More mobile clinics and specialist services are needed for pregnant refugees crossing Europe

Tehmina was traveling through Greece from Syria when she went into labor. However, the first-time mother was determined to continue her journey and have her baby once she reached Germany. Finally, her family convinced her to go to the hospital and she agreed to give birth in Greece. Just hours later, Tehmina and her newborn left the hospital and continued to walk.

Her story is by no means unique. For the first time since the refugee and migrant crisis hit Europe, there are now more women and children on the move than male adults. Women and children account for 60 percent of refugees and migrants.

Every day, some 500 women die in pregnancy or childbirth in humanitarian settings. Sixty percent of preventable maternal deaths and 53 percent of under-five fatalities take place in countries affected by, or prone to, conflict, forced displacement or natural disaster.

The situation prompted 13 countries to announce at the first World Humanitarian Summit on May 23-24 their commitment between now and 2030 to increase their support for sexual and reproductive health services and supplies.

The plight of pregnant refugees is illustrated by a recent joint field assessment from the United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR), its Population Fund (UNFPA) and the Women’s Refugee Commission (WRC). Researchers looking into the risks for refugee and migrant women and girls in Greece and Macedonia heard from humanitarian agencies that women often left hospitals less than 24 hours after giving birth, some having had a Caesarean section.

Pregnant and lactating women, even those with health problems, are reluctant to access services or visit hospitals for fear of delaying their journey, losing their baby or being separated from their family. Most of the women seen in Greece and Macedonia had suffered severe physical and psychological stress while traveling. Even if they were otherwise healthy, they were at higher risk of complications, premature delivery or even death.

Deni Robey, the WRC’s director of strategic communications, says assessments show very little readily available sexual and reproductive health care: “Pregnant women were waiting until the last possible moment to go to a hospital to deliver and then were back out walking within a day.”

These expectant and new mothers receive no cards or flowers. As they make their way through Europe on foot, with numerous stops and practically nonexistent antenatal or postnatal care, they will be lucky to have a bed for the night or collect basic supplies such as diapers and formula.

Many will experience fatigue from walking, heavy bleeding or other complications related to pregnancy or recent birth. Others may be weak from dehydration and poor nutrition. Some are already caring for one child or more.

The report from UNHCR, UNFPA and WRC highlights single women traveling alone or with children, pregnant and lactating women, and early-married children – sometimes with newborn babies – as among those who are particularly at risk of extortion and exploitation, including multiple forms of sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV).

The E.U.-Turkey deal that came into effect March 20 only exacerbates the situation for women. Doina Bologa, the UNFPA representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina, was assigned in mid-May as the organization’s senior emergency coordinator for Europe. She says: “Currently, the migration flow through the Balkans has practically halted, with only an estimate of 200-300 illegal or irregular migrants being counted by UNHCR in transit towards the Western European countries. Some 50,000 refugees or migrants are reported to be currently stranded in Greece and accommodated in some 40 camps.”

In an open letter this month to E.U. member states and institutions, Médecins Sans Frontières international president Joanna Liu brands the official welcome offered by Europe to those stranded in Greece as “shameful,” and says camps on the Greek islands have “virtually no safeguards” in place. “Women fear to go to the toilet once darkness falls, mothers beg for milk formula to feed their babies,” she wrote.

But care and services for pregnant women are slowly starting to improve. In the last few months, UNFPA has introduced four mobile health clinics with ultrasound equipment in Serbia and Macedonia, although border closures now limit women’s access to these.

Meanwhile, UNHCR is rolling out 20 Blue Dot centers: Child and family support hubs located at strategic sites (such as border entry or exit points) that will provide a package of services including mother and baby/toddler spaces, counseling, psychosocial first aid and social workers.

Providing information in a language that pregnant women understand and having female translators at transit centers remain challenges, as does access to contraception and family planning advice, says Bologa at UNFPA.

Signatories to the 13-state WHS pledge will ensure that financing for humanitarian action includes access to sexual and reproductive health. The group also backs a rollout by 2017 of the Minimum Initial Services Package (MISP) within 48 hours of an emergency. This series of crucial actions includes an objective to prevent maternal and newborn illness and death.

Sandra Krause, director of the sexual and reproductive health program at WRC, says: “We want the commitment from all humanitarian actors to implement the MISP from the onset of every humanitarian emergency, and to comprehensive sexual and reproductive health care for all women and adolescent girls as soon as the situation stabilizes.”

Krause would like to see more mobile clinics serving this itinerant refugee population, and emergency response training for local health workers.

Bologa at UNFPA says there is a need for “more systemic and sustained attention” to gender-based violence issues, given that some of these women are pregnant because they have been involved in trafficking, transactional sex or domestic violence: “This migration is quite unprecedented, and the international community is still struggling to come to terms with these problems.”