Could Providing Livelihoods for Women in Refugee Situations Actually Do More Harm Than Good?

Only when women's safety is not taken into account.  

This week my client, the Women's Refugee Commission,  launched a blog series on AidSpeak, the blog of AidSource: The humanitarian social network. 

It's part of our Peril or Protection: Making Work Safe campaign. The campaign is geared to international development and humanitarian programers, practitioners, and donors who manage livelihood programs for women in refugee and displacement settings.  The Women's Refugee Commission is a wealthy resource of research articles and learning tools on topics related to making the lives of refugees better and brighter.  The livelihood tools, including a one-hour e-learning course, will help those in the field to design safer livelihood programs for women. 

Zehra Rizvi, Senior Program Officer for the WRC writes:

Do the economic empowerment programs you design take into account risk that you could possibly be causing the women participating?

We’ve asked some bloggers, journalists, practitioners to blog about this issue for us by taking a look at the tools we’ve produced but we would love to hear your perspective on the issue.  

Read the blog here to learn more, including how to contribute to the AidSource blog.