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An Oral History Archive of Real-Time Displacement
Why oral history and why now?
Most data on displaced women is aggregate; numbers without context. The oral history format does what statistics cannot: it records what it actually feels like to live through displacement and its costs, and what women know about their own situation that no survey has asked.
We focus specifically on female-headed households because this population is systematically undercounted and underserved. They are not a subset of the refugee crisis; they are often its center.
And we do this in real time. Not retrospectively. These are not archived memories of past displacement. These are current, ongoing accounts recorded while women are still living through them.
Consent-led, trauma-informed, locally grounded.
Every oral history begins with a trusted local partner — an organization already embedded in the community. We don't arrive as outsiders with recorders. Our field researchers build relationships first. Interviews unfold across multiple sessions, giving women time and full control over what they share.
Learn more about our field methodology →The Process
1
Partner
We partner with local organizations and community leaders in areas hosting refugees and internally displaced persons affected by war, conflict, and disaster. Together, we create inclusive programs that give single mothers and female-headed households space to share their stories, preserve memories, and be heard.
Our work challenges harmful stigma around mothers raising children outside patriarchal households and highlights the leadership and value they bring to community life
2
Partner Training
Education and training are designed for each partner based on local geography, language, culture, and oral history experience. Programs cover core methods such as research ethics and informed consent, trauma-aware interviewing, open-ended questioning and listening, cross-language work and translation, and basic documentation and archiving.
These programs prepare partners to interview displaced single mothers and female-headed households who choose to participate. We also support partners with technology for digital data collection, secure storage, safety protocols, encryption, data management, and responsible sharing. Our team provides frequent and consistent mentorship.
3
Publish & Advocate
The Refugee Archive curates and shares portions of oral histories collected across social media and the web. We publish interviews, short clips, blog posts, and analytical summaries that connect to current policy and humanitarian contexts.
For selected interview series, we produce qualitative reports and visuals, including sentiment analysis, to draw insights, adjust programs, and respond in real time to the needs of displaced single mothers and female-headed households.
Refugee Voices, a blog on Substack, is a space where single mothers and female-headed households publish blog posts, share images, and record audio to explain concepts, memories, or traditions in their own words.
4
Archive
We partner with a university to preserve the full, unedited record of our work, including audio, video, transcripts, images, and other media. This provides secure, long-term storage on university-managed systems that follow international standards for ethics, privacy, and digital preservation, protects the stories, making organized collections available to those working to improve policy and programs.
The archive is housed within the university’s library and research systems, where materials are cataloged, tagged, and maintained by archivists.
5
Evidence &
Learning
We produce qualitative research and monitoring, evaluation, and learning projects, including thematic studies, rapid listening exercises, and learning briefs that identify patterns across interviews and settings.
We turn what displaced single mothers are saying into clear findings, recommendations, and tools that can shape policy, programs, procurement, and funding.
Displacement and Conflict Snapshot
