Take a deeper look at our stories from around the world.
Each month, AJWS shares the latest developments from our grantee-partners and our staff working to create a better, more just world. You might call this blend of grantee profiles, opinion pieces, and organizational updates a window into the state of human rights around the world. We just call it Stories of Hope.
We support women, girls and LGBTQI+ people, as they organize to end discrimination, stop violence and live with dignity, safety and health.
We aid communities and movements organizing to protect the land, water and natural resources that people depend on for their survival.
Each year, 15 million girls worldwide are married before the age of 18—sometimes against their will. AJWS supports efforts to end child marriage by bringing girls and young women together to define their own futures.
We aid communities and movements that speak out against injustice, hold governments accountable to respect the rights of all people, and work to recover from civil wars and other conflicts.
When disasters and emergencies strike in the countries where we work, AJWS provides immediate humanitarian relief to activists on the front lines.
A visual storytelling collaboration from AJWS and Magnum Foundation
Witness social change up close through these videos from around the globe. You'll watch a day in the life of an activist AJWS supports and learn how they change lives and build social movements for justice.
Analysis, proposals, and personal stories brought to you directly from Haitian civil society leaders.
An archive of stories related to Robert Bank, who served AJWS from 2009-2026.
An archive of stories related to Ruth Messinger, who served AJWS from 1998-2016.
Sunita Jaiswal can’t remember a time when she was happier. On a Saturday afternoon in her tiny house—set in a sprawling, crowded Delhi slum—her daughters grin and perch along the narrow stairs, bounding up or down to make way for passing guests. Meanwhile, Sunita pours cold soda into steel cups and passes them around, beaming …
On a damp Monday morning this past March, we headed out of our Kolkata hotel to find the dark streets still wet with rain that fell throughout the night. The streets were just starting to pulse with life. As we drove through the city to Asia’s busiest train station, the reminders of Kolkata’s colonial past were on display, from the architecture to the traffic police in their white uniforms, waving on the traffic with their batons.
We believe that everyone has the right to live free from violence and constant threat. Yet around the world, an estimated 1 in 3 women will experience assault, rape or other abuse in her lifetime. Nicaragua is no exception, where each year dozens of women are murdered while their attackers roam free. AJWS grantees in …
“We are telling the truth. We want to be heard, and we want justice,” said a petite, elderly woman to a room full of journalists and human rights activists in Guatemala City on February 13, 2016. A survivor of sexual slavery during Guatemala’s decades-long civil war, the woman’s face was obscured by a Mayan scarf to protect her identity.
Mobilizing women to make peace
Hundreds of Maya Achi people were murdered to make way for a dam in Guatemala. Decades later, their families finally find justice. Back in 1982, Carlos Chen Osorio was a young man with a family: his wife, Paulina, and their toddler children, Enriqueta and Antonio. Paulina carried their third child inside her, and expected to …
Investigative journalists keep Haiti’s officials accountable for responsible reconstruction. Billions of dollars in foreign aid and reconstruction projects have flooded into Haiti since the earthquake, but the process for deciding how the money will be spent is not transparent. While displaced earthquake survivors languish in tent camps, U.S. government funds have sometimes been directed toward …
This award-winning NGO helps activists stay safe, so they can keep speaking out against injustice. In recent years, activists who defend human rights in Guatemala have faced a rising wave of targeted violence that aims to crush their growing movements for social change. From 2008 to 2011, there were 1,286 reports of attacks against human …
Thirty years of armed conflict in Casamance have left many people—especially women—feeling powerless: powerless to stop the frequent deadly bursts of guerilla violence, and powerless to feed and educate their children in the midst of the chaos of conflict. But one woman, Seynabou Male Cissé, a former high school teacher, saw the potential of women …
Cecelia Danuweli has been to hell and back. As a girl during Liberia’s brutal civil war, she witnessed her stepfather murdered before her eyes and faced the constant threat of rape and other violence as warring factions attacked her village. In 1990, she fled for her life and spent years living in the bush, hiding …
