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Research & Programs
Listen & Watch
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From war zones to resettlement camps, from data to diaries, this podcast brings the archive to life. The Refugee Archive is a nonprofit organization and global center dedicated to preserving and amplifying the voices of refugee women leading households. Featuring refugee women, scholars, and archivists, it champions the power of voice, the preservation of memory, and the stories that shape policy, hearts, and minds.
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A curated space highlighting archives, storytelling initiatives, and oral history projects focused on migrants, immigrants, internally displaced individuals, and refugees worldwide. These efforts, like ours, preserve memory, elevate voice, and challenge silence. We'd like to invite you to explore the broader community of narrative-based advocacy and scholarship.
In this episode, host Aboderin Enoch sits down with Rita Trias-Prats (PhD Candidate, Autonomous University of Barcelona) and Dr. Albert Esteve (Center for Demographic Studies) to discuss research spanning 60 years and 156 countries.
Drawing from 94 studies across multiple regions, this conversation challenges a simple assumption: that vulnerability is mainly about income. It's also shaped by structural inequality, access to resources, and how institutions respond to women's lives — from displacement and rural isolation to financial exclusion and climate shocks.
Learn & Engage
Join us for local and global virtual events, panels, exhibits, and presentations advancing thought, research, and oral history archiving on displaced female-headed households in displacement contexts.
The Refugee Archive Education Portal is a private, partner-facing learning environment built to support the people doing this work on the ground. It is not a public course platform. Each portal is developed in partnership with a specific organization and tailored to their country context, language, and operational needs.
Current portal content includes training modules on trauma-informed oral history methodology, informed consent and ethical documentation practices, field research protocols, data security and responsible sharing, and oral history writing and translation resources. Materials are accessible by secure link and password, available only to verified partner organizations within our active Story-to-Action Labs.
New partners interested in developing a portal for their country or organization can request one through our partnership process. Portals are built collaboratively — we work with your team to understand your context before any curriculum is designed.
The Education Portal represents one of the most concrete ways The Refugee Archive builds lasting local capacity. Rather than training people once and leaving, we create a persistent, updatable resource that partner organizations can return to throughout the partnership and beyond. This is infrastructure, not a workshop.
We invite Artists to visualize oral histories, turning the archive into a vessel for advocacy. Read the details on The Art of Oral History Page
Read & Research
About Video
State of the World for Female-Headed Households is The Refugee Archive’s annual journal focused on displaced single mothers and female-headed households (FHHs) across refugee and IDP contexts.
We publish original research, rigorous reviews, and short commentary that help improve policy, programs, and accountability.
We welcome submissions from academics, practitioners, and local researchers, including teams working in displacement settings.
Female-Headed Household Policy Tracker
The FHH Policy Tracker examines how national laws shape the lives of displaced single mothers and female-headed households across conflict and displacement settings, tracked country by country, updated as policies change.
What makes this project different is who does the research. Our analysts are students and early-career professionals working in the countries they're analyzing, people with direct knowledge of the legal, cultural, and political contexts that shape these women's lives. Most come from affiliated universities in developing countries. Others are recent graduates building policy and research portfolios.
Join the tracking team. If you're a student or early-career researcher interested in gender policy, displacement, or humanitarian law, we want to hear from you. You'll work alongside a global team, contribute to published country analyses, and build experience that connects directly to real policy conversations.