By Luay Shabaneh*
As we mark World Refugee Day this week, I think of millions of family stories and young people’s dreams traveling from one place to the other, making their homes somewhere else. These stories pave the walls of tents in Jordan and Lebanon, and the words of loved ones left behind linger in the air of new homes in new countries. And since we are now in the World Cup season, I can’t help but tell myself that most football teams playing in Moscow this year could not have been formed without refugees, young men who arrived in their new countries and offered their talent to the different national teams.
Like in previous years, Syria continued to account for the largest forcibly displaced population globally, as per the latest figures by UNHCR, with 12.6 million forcibly displaced Syrians at the of 2017. As someone who has worked in the fields of politics, aid and development for over 25 years, I must admit that the Arab region never ceases to sober me if only because of the magnitude and regularity of the crises that hit it, but women in the region never cease to amaze me with their resourcefulness and resilience.
The international response to the last few years of upheaval in the Middle East has mostly been of a humanitarian and emergency-type, of providing lifesaving services like food, shelter and clean drinking water, and setting up educational programmes for children and empowerment sessions for women… while waiting for the political dust to set. Because while aid agencies struggle to provide services, it is actually the UN member states that call the shots, initiate conflicts and resolve them through negotiations.
Against this background, organizations working with the displaced and refugees are constantly requested, by donors, to present creative solutions to a number of issues that can help mitigate human suffering. In my case, my work with UNFPA, the United Nations Population Fund, has taught me to look again at what constitutes a priority during a humanitarian crisis. Indeed, I regularly must remind donors and political stakeholders that in an emergency situation, women and girls often face the highest risks on their lives, health and safety, not because they are more vulnerable by nature but because the social and cultural structures around them often make their dependence on male family members a condition for their survival, and consequently make them vulnerable to the whims of men and boys around them. I also must regularly plead for longer term solutions that seek to transform the lives of women and girls, regardless of where they are: whether they are refugees, displaced or still in their communities, we advocate for girls to be safe, to be schooled, to be informed about their rights and about what might constitute a life changing decision, such as the decision to become pregnant. In fact, many of our programmes are designed to ensure that girls and women learn about their health, their options, and the implications of getting married young and becoming a mother too early. We remind communities of the opportunities that girls can gain if they continue their education and delay decisions like marriage and childbearing until they become adults, after they turn 18.
We see many girls and young women during the endless awareness and empowerment sessions we run in our women safe spaces, which are special centres we set up close to communities in distress to give women a space to resort to when they need a break or when they need support. In these centres, our staff can counsel women on their legal rights, and can provide psychosocial support to help women and girls overcome the hardship they face. We also often run specialized training courses to help build skills that women can then monetize, thus becoming more financially independent.
Most young women we speak to have dreams of becoming stronger, more established, less exposed. They share the stories of strong women in their communities, women who were able to stand up for their and other women’s rights, and were therefore able to change the course of their lives, even under compelling circumstances such as displacement and uprooting.
To these strong women who open the way for girls to believe that change is possible, I pay tribute and celebrate their resilience and determination. A popular Egyptian proverb says “Only its [a community’s] women can make it” is very true: on World Refugee Day, I bow to the girls and women we work with, for only they can truly patch together the lives of their families and communities and give them hope, even under a tent.
*Luay Shabaneh is UNFPA’s director for the Arab region