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Exciting news from Echoing Green Fellow Sasha Chanoff. Cross-posted from RefugePoint (formerly Mapendo International):

Mapendo International has today announced that it is changing its name to RefugePoint in order to better reflect its core mission of protecting the world’s most vulnerable and forgotten refugees.

Sasha Chanoff, RefugePoint’s executive director, explained that the organization’s staff have been impressed for years by the many refugees who relate that contact with RefugePoint became the turning point in their lives. “Our effort,” he says, “is to provide lasting solutions for people fleeing from persecution, war, and genocide. The new name, RefugePoint, reflects the moment when those most at risk see the possibility of deliverance from lives of fear and desperation and a path opening up toward new lives for themselves and their families.”

Many of the world’s 10.4 million refugees exist in life-threatening situations. While some languish in overcrowded refugee camps, an increasing number flee to urban slum areas where they struggle to survive without even the barest of safety nets. In Africa they come from the Congo, Darfur, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Rwanda, Somalia, Southern Sudan, Zimbabwe, and other countries and regions. The international community can barely shelter and feed the majority, much less tend to the unique needs of those who are truly forsaken and forgotten. “RefugePoint’s entire effort,” Chanoff says, “is to reach and succor these people whose struggle to survive would otherwise go unaddressed.”

In the past six years RefugePoint has provided life-saving interventions and helped to create lasting solutions for over 20,000 refugees in Africa. RefugePoint works with national governments, the UN Refugee Agency and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to enhance and improve systems to address the needs of vulnerable refugees in Africa and worldwide. RefugePoint’s recent research in Nairobi on refugee girls and young women highlights their extreme vulnerability, including being subjected to dangers such as trafficking, survival sex, forced marriage, indentured servitude, rape and other forms of sexual and gender based violence. Unaccompanied refugee children face similar dangers as well as slavery, forced recruitment into rogue militias, and other perils. Still others are threatened by forced return home, disease, starvation, and are sometimes pursued across borders by the killers who chased them from their homes. RefugePoint’s programs focus on ways to alleviate their plight.

From its founding in 2005 through today, RefugePoint staff have worked in Botswana, Burundi, Chad, Egypt, Ethiopia, Kenya, Mozambique, Namibia, Rwanda, Sudan, South Africa, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe. On a global level, staff regularly take part in and lead discussions on refugee issues in Geneva and Washington DC among governments, The UN Refugee Agency and other NGOs in a sustained effort to improve and re-imagine the world’s response to its most endangered peoples.