The Campaign to Get Beyond Firewood

The rape of refugee women and girls during firewood collection is unacceptable. We must do more to reduce the risk.

The food distributed to refugees by relief agencies must be cooked before it can be eaten, but the issue of safe access to appropriate cooking fuel has long been ignored by the humanitarian community. Women and girls are left to fend for themselves, and after years of abuse, they have become accustomed to the brutal attacks they risk when they venture out of their camps in search of firewood. Ultimately, they have become resigned to rape.

No longer.

The Women’s Refugee Commission has taken the lead on finding solutions to the crisis by spearheading a ground breaking, international effort to find safer alternatives: clean-burning fuels, fuel-efficient stoves, solar cookers and cutting-edge technologies that the world has yet to develop.

We are:

• shifting the humanitarian community’s ad hoc approach to fuel to one that is sustainable
• mobilizing innovators worldwide to develop new technologies and energy solutions
• uncovering what’s working and what’s not through field missions and intensive research
• working with refugees to find the right fuels and cooking tools for their needs

We are working with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the World Food Program (WFP) and other humanitarian partners to promote safe, practical and technologically cutting-edge alternatives to firewood. We are leading an international effort (a coalition of UN agencies and international nongovernmental organizations) to fundamentally change the way the humanitarian community tackles this problem—forcing agencies and the donors that fund them to start thinking about cooking fuel in the same way they think of food or water—as an absolute necessity for life.

It is no longer acceptable for us to put this burden entirely on the shoulders—literally—of refugee and displaced women and girls.