Refugees International

What happened to him?

This was someone who was interviewed by Refugees International.

This gentleman said that once he was in Cap-Haitien, he was trying to find a way to get to his relatives, which lived in another part of Haiti.

The problem is a lot of the roads, the main roads, are controlled by gangs, and so you risk death.

He's an entrepreneur and the founder of Tech from Palestine, which helps Palestinian youth and engineers access the global technology ecosystem.

And in Washington, D.C., Natasha Hall, a senior advocate for the Middle East with Refugees International and an associate fellow at Chatham House.

A warm welcome to the program.

Now, I'd like to start in Deir el-Bala with Mohammed.

One particular horror of that war was the way that widespread and systematic sexual violence was used as a war tactic against Tigrayan women and girls.

Reports from dozens of experts, including by us here at Refugees International, found systematic sexual assault, sexual slavery, forced pregnancy, and many other abuses that were pervasive and ethnically targeted.

As we will hear later in the episode, that sometimes included soldiers raping women and telling them that they were attempting to infect them with HIV.

These atrocities left deep, lasting physical and psychological harm on survivors who, in the aftermath, frequently lacked access to basic healthcare and support services to address sexual violence.

44 Americans were also killed in that terrorist attack.

Two years later, a deal was reached that was supposed to end that war, and in between those two years, we saw famine, we saw genocide, we saw total devastation.

Soon after the October 7th attacks, Refugees International issued a statement that I just want to read because I think it really anticipated the devastation that was to come, rooted in the total disregard by both Hamas and the Israeli government for the basic standards of international humanitarian law.

So we wrote at the time that reciprocal crimes against humanity between Hamas and the Israeli military will lead inevitably to a historic humanitarian calamity that will principally devastate civilians.

Specifically, US humanitarian spending fell from $14 billion to less than $4 billion between 2024 and 2025, accounting for almost the entire global decline in humanitarian funding.

According to Refugees International, global humanitarian aid fell by roughly 40% between 2022 and 2025, leading to what they called a historic implosion of global humanitarian response.

En and Jose, based on their experience in the humanitarian sector, saw an opportunity to create funding infrastructure that not only moves private dollars to local organizations, but also creates greater transparency and shares power with those organizations.

Though their work with The Aid Cloud is focused on humanitarian efforts, the kind of connections their platform is making between private donors and frontline organizations could apply to other sectors like health, agriculture, and more.

We brought this initially.

Um- It's endorsed by No One Left Behind, by Global Refuge, by Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, by Refugees International, by HIAS, by all...

Like, I think we have over 100 endorsements.

We've been collecting the endorsements, and it's wild.