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Women's Project

Women refugees and asylum seekers are some of the most vulnerable members of our society. Many have suffered traumatic experiences and become lonely and isolated. The Women’s Project, based in the East Midlands and due to start in summer 2005, is based on a pilot scheme that has already helped scores of women in the East Midlands to rebuild their lives.

Between May 2002 and May 2004 the project offered a female-only drop-in centre providing confidential advice to more than 400 asylum seekers and refugees each year.

Naima

Centre users received advice on subjects from education and employment to finding a GP or the local post office. The women also had the opportunity to take part in activities like English lessons, computer classes, jewellery-making, cookery and crafts to develop friendships, enhance their skills. There were creches and interpreters at both centres.

Refugee Action also plans to offer training to other agencies, such as health professionals, midwives, education providers, employment agencies and voluntary organisations like rape crisis on how to make their services more accessible to refugees and asylum seekers.

Case study

Naima (pictured above) lives in a tiny, two-room flat in the East Midlands. She is unable to open the windows in the dark, airless bedroom where she sleeps with her four-month-old son, Mahat, because they are boarded up with metal sheeting. There is no hot water. The landlord has told her to boil it if she needs it, but the cooker is faulty. When she tries to turn on the hobs, the loud snap of a circuit breaker makes her jump with fright.

Naima is a long way from her home town of Merca, 60 miles south of the Somali capital Mogadishu, where the regular calls to prayer were interrupted by occasional ruptures of gunfire. When she ventures outside, she would like to be able to speak to local people, but knows only a handful of English words.

“I am learning English from the TV,” she says. “I want to go to school but who is going to take care of my child?”

A shopkeeper’s daughter, Naima, 29, was a college student in Somalia. Her family were members of an ethnic group, the Ashraf, which since the outbreak of civil war has been preyed upon by militias from the dominant Somali clans. Minorities like the Ashraf have been the victims of killings, lootings, rapes and abductions. Naima had already lost her husband to the civil war when her father was killed and her mother disappeared.

“I was pregnant and there was nobody left to protect me. I knew I had to escape for the sake of my unborn child.”

Naima has been a regular visitor at the Women’s Welcome Project in Leicester, a centre run by Refugee Action and the Church of the Martyrs, which offers isolated women support and advice and the chance to form social networks.

“The staff and volunteers are very good friends to me. They help me with milk, nappies and clothing. Other Somali women come and I can talk in my own language. It makes me feel less lonely. All I want is to be safe and healthy and live in peace.”

Project details

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