On 3 March,  journalist, broadcaster and campaigner Mariella Frostrup presented the BBC Radio 4 appeal on behalf of the International Rescue Committee. You can listen to the appeal online now on the BBC website.

Laurina Tokpah is 24.  After Laurina’s parents threw her out of their home, she was forced to beg on the streets of Monrovia to make ends meet. Every day Laurina faced a challenge to avoid poverty, sexual violence, human smuggling and trafficking.

However thanks to an IRC sponsored business training course, Luarina is now a successful businesswoman "I sell everything from food and drinks to toothpaste," she says.

This week IRC-UK visited North London International School to thank them for fundraising for our work in Haiti. Emilie Lockey, a student of the school, decided to fundraise for IRC-UK after reading about what we have achieved in Haiti a year since the earthquake, and our ongoing commitment to helping the country recover. Emilie organised two cake sales and a non-uniform day and managed to raise an impressive £300, which will help us in our efforts to prevent the spread of cholera in Haiti.

The name of the International Rescue Committee is currently being used in an email scam purporting to seek donations for Haiti. The email asks for donations to a joint appeal by the IRC with the United Nations World Food Programme. This is a fraudulent email and we do not have such an appeal with the WFP. The email asks people to make wire transfers to an account and also includes a donation form branded as a third charity, the Human Relief Foundation. It includes text taken from official IRC materials. Anyone receiving such an email should simply ignore and delete it.

By Margaret Hanks, fundraising manager When John Hurt agreed to present the International Rescue Committee's appeal on BBC Radio 4, I was delighted. Not only was this a fantastic opportunity for us to reach an audience of some 1.9 million people but I had never been involved in anything like this before, as I work mainly with charitable trusts. Last December, I heard from the BBC's appeals office that our application for a broadcast appeal had been accepted.

On Sunday 16 August 2009, actor John Hurt will be making an appeal on behalf of the International Rescue Committee on BBC Radio 4. John, star of Shooting Dogs and Harry Potter, will tell the story of Orlando, a boy who fled Liberia in the 1990s to a refugee camp in neighbouring Guinea where he was able to continue his education thanks to a programme run by the IRC. Now back in Liberia, the IRC is helping him again, along with 99 other young people, at a vocational training school as Liberia looks to recover from two decades of war.

Not On Our Watch, founded by Don Cheadle, George Clooney, Matt Damon, Brad Pitt, Jerry Weintraub and David Pressman, has awarded the International Rescue Committee $260,000 (about £175,000) to support critical health services at seven clinics in North Darfur. “As the conflict in Darfur continues, victims of violence remain desperately in need of basic support services,” says Matt Damon.

With a four hour round trip on foot to college each day as part of the deal London law student Paul Doran has been living on 67p a day for the last two weeks to raise funds for those affected by fighting in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. 67p is equivalent to $1 a day – the amount that a billion people around the world, including many of those caught up in the violence in North Kivu, have to survive on.