Ned Colt/The IRC

Sophia Jones Mwangi/The IRC

The International Rescue Committee in Kenya has been responding to a polio outbreak in the world’s largest refugee complex, Dadaab. “We were the first organisation to detect the disease,” explains Hassan Coulibaly, who runs IRC’s operations in Hagadera, one of five camps in this sprawling complex that houses almost half a million refugees, mainly from Somalia.

The photographs above were taken by the IRC's Liz Pender in and around the Yida refugee camp in South Sudan, to which tens of thousands of refugees have fled in recent months, following fighting in northern Sudan.

Photgraphy: Liz Pender/The IRC

Article: Stefano Gelmini

The International Rescue Committee is scaling up health and nutrition programmes in Chad and dispatching emergency experts to Mali as millions of people in these countries and across the drought-ravaged Sahel region face a growing humanitarian disaster.

Article: Sanj Srikanthan and Clara Thompson Photography: Sanj Srikanthan/IRC

As hundreds of thousands of people in Mali are still suffering from fighting and a worsening food crisis, the IRC is mobilising its emergency team to provide water in battle-scarred cities in the north of the country and treatment for malnourished children in the drought-hit south.

Guest blogger Brenna O’Rourke is an IRC intern in Chad, where the IRC is providing healthcare and other essential services to 58,000 Darfuri refugees in two camps, and to local communities who support them. When women and girls flee a crisis such as the conflict in Darfur, Sudan, the threat of assault follows them. They can also face early marriage, domestic violence, genital mutilation or harassment.  Our work in Chad includes urgent care for survivors of sexual violence.

My International Rescue Committee colleague Peter Biro is in the Central African Republic (CAR), one of the world's poorest countries. 

A long-running civil war decimated CAR's health care system. Today, there are no more than 300 doctors in the entire country -- and almost 20 percent of children living there die before the age of five.

Yolanda Barberá oversees the International Rescue Committee’s community-based child healthcare programs in Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Southern Sudan, Ethiopia, Ivory Coast and Uganda. Yolanda, a native of Spain, has worked  in healthcare for over 14 years in Africa in Asia.

One of the most familiar and devastating diseases in the countries where the IRC works is also one of the most preventable and treatable: malaria.

Kenya is home to hundreds of thousands of refugees, and the International Rescue Committee supports them and native Kenyans with clean water, health care and protection during emergencies, and with job training and education on legal rights and protections.

The IRC is the only provider of health care in the Kakuma refugee camp in north-western Kenya, where our community-based rehabilitation programme is providing life-changing assistance to people living with disabilities. This week IRC grants intern Jane Yang is sharing some of their stories: