C. For Women and Girls in Syria, Humanitarian Efforts Need to Engage Women
and Address Host Country Conditions That Lead to Vulnerability (Lesson #2675)
Observation.
Education and women’s leadership are critical to effective humanitarian response. By building the capacity
of women and girls, humanitarian aid workers can improve their protection within camps and other refugee
settings and ensure the affected population is informed about their rights and the services available to
them. While outside of the scope of traditional humanitarian work, this should be accompanied by
reversing legislation that restricts the livelihoods of refugees in their respective host countries.
Discussion.
At the present moment, the Syrian conflict is the worst humanitarian crisis since World War II. Over 13.5
million people have been killed or forced to leave their homes since fighting broke out between Alawite
supporters of President Bashar al-Assad and Sunni dissidents—unrest carried over from the Arab Spring.
Of the affected population, 4.1 million have been women and girls of reproductive age, including 360,000
pregnant women. International organizations such as the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA)
prioritize these women and girls in their humanitarian efforts, focusing on protection and health services.
Syrians in diaspora are often met with hostility or a lack of resources in neighboring host countries as well
as a severe lack of international funding to meet their needs as refugees. It would require $4.5 billion to
meet the needs of the most vulnerable Syrians, but the UN has only raised $2.9 billion to respond to the
crisis. Migration has overwhelmed already weak and impoverished governments with 4.8 million Syrian
refugees seeking safety in neighboring countries. Large numbers have been displaced to Turkey, Iraq,
Jordan, and Lebanon. One in four people living within Lebanon’s state borders is now a Syrian refugee.
Syrians—and particularly women and girls—are vulnerable to exploitation in such conditions.
Displacement into neighboring countries has led to an increase in early marriage for Syrian girls. While
early marriage does occur in Syria, human rights and humanitarian assistance organizations such as Human
Rights Watch (HRW) and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) are increasingly
finding that the rates at which it takes place are exacerbated by families’ lack of economic opportunities
and inability to provide for themselves. Girls are increasingly married off—not because of any cultural or
societal drivers but because of desperate economic conditions, restricted educational opportunities, and
their parents’ limited possibilities for employment in host country labor markets. As a result, 23 percent of
Syrian women are married before the age of 18.
Education and empowerment initiatives for young women are working to address unusually high rates of
child marriage through peer-to-peer training. In Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan, a girl named Saba and her
mother, Izdihar, are working together to warn other young women about the dangers of early marriage. By
advocating for her peers and encouraging parents to educate their daughters instead of marrying them off,
Saba feels that she is able to make a difference in her camp. She says, “The girls that are in schools are the
ones most likely not to get married. . . . When a girl gets an education and a diploma, she has a chance to
get a good job instead of a husband who controls her.”
Training young women as educators has a clear impact on addressing cultural expectations around early
marriage that put Syrian women and girls at risk. However, it does little to successfully address the
socioeconomic conditions that Syrian families find themselves in that lead parents to turn to the option of
early marriage in the first place. Humanitarian efforts to protect and empower women and girls affected
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