USAIM.org used to be the primary website for the non-profit US partner of the International Organization for Migration (IOM), the UN migration agency. That organization was established in 1951, and is the primary vehicle for inter-government coordination to deal with migration.

Perhaps to align itself more with the IOM, USAIM.org decided to abandon this domain name, and adopt USAforIOM.org as its new name. With our interest in all things migration, we picked up the old name and intend to resurrect the old website as a historical record of the work of USAIM for IOM. Perhaps we will also add some new content that fits and goes along with the old.

Watch for the new, old USAIM back here as we get to this project. While we wait, you can get in touch.

The post A Historical Record – USAIM to USA for IOM appeared first on USAIM.

In November 2017, CNN reported that African migrants were sold off as slaves in Libya for the equivalent of approximately $400. Earlier in 2017, IOM, the UN Migration Agency, had sounded the alarm on the existence of “Libyan slave markets” and reported harrowing shared by African migrants in Niger and Libya.

“We were horrified to find out that migrants were exploited and enslaved in Libya. IOM took immediate measures to work with national authorities and with countries of origin to disrupt this human exploitation, assist the most vulnerable and called for the protection of all victims and migrants in Libya. Today, we are glad to see that members of the civil society are also joining these efforts and taking action to denounce and demand the end all forms of modern slavery,” said Luca Dall’Oglio, CEO of USA for IOM.

In 2017, IOM rescued over 19,000 migrants out of Libya and helped them return to their home country. Upon their arrivals, the most vulnerable migrants also received psychosocial support. Additionally, all migrants were given a “pocket money” allowance to cover their immediate needs such as transportation, clothing and housing once they arrived. In 2018, IOM is continuing its repatriation operations and is providing reintegration assistance.

“As long as migration remains under the management of smuggling and trafficking networks, we will continue to see desperate individuals being abused throughout their migration journey” said Mr Dall’Oglio. “By facilitating and encouraging alternative modalities for regular, documented and safe migration channels, we will be better equipped to address human rights violations and be more effective in combatting transnational criminal networks preying on the migrants.”

All proceeds from the anti-slavery march will be donated to the International Organization for Migration (IOM) to support their efforts in assisting and protecting vulnerable migrants in Libya and other transit countries.

The march will be held on January 27 at 10:00 am PT in downtown Los Angeles. The following speakers confirmed their participation in the march:

• Sahndra Fon Dufe – Actress, Author of Yefon: The Red Necklace
• Angelique Mendes – Actress, Model, Waterkeeper Ambassador
• Bamba Bambadjan – Hollywood Actor (Black Panther), DACA activist
• Tolu Olubunmi – Social Entrepreneur and Member of USA for IOM’s Board of Directors
• Funmilola Fagbamila – Playwright, USC Professor, Activist
• Adrienne Nicole – Community Activist and Democratic Party Candidate for Congress

The post USA for IOM to Join Anti-slavery March in Los Angeles appeared first on USAIM.

The geography alone makes this one of the world’s most difficult borders to manage. But the job facing the Tajik and Afghan border agencies has become even tougher with growing insecurity in northern Afghanistan since 2014.

Better coordination between Tajik and Afghan border guards has become essential as both sides try to encourage legal cross-border business, while combating the often deadly threat posed by narcotics and human traffickers.

Against this backdrop, the UN Migration Agency, IOM, facilitated over 50 joint training courses for Tajik and Afghan border guards in Tajikistan between 2009 and 2014. However, for cultural and operational reasons, the participants were all men.

But in 2014 this changed when, with the financial support of the United States Bureau for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Agencies (INL), IOM Tajikistan delivered its first joint training course for 15 Tajik and Afghan women at Dushanbe’s Training Center for Border Guards.

The 10-day program was the first of its kind and became the basis for building trust and improving communication between the Tajik and Afghan border agencies. Both sides and IOM agreed that Afghan women attending the first course could be chaperoned by male family members – a normal practice in Afghan culture. After being assured that the women will receive training in the military unit territory where only female officers have access and will be accompanied at all time, their chaperons realized that it was unnecessary to be present.

Nadia, an officer of the Afghan Border Police, is one of the 50 Afghan women who, so far, have received a training along with 51 Tajik women. She joined the Border Police Force after her husband was killed.

“War is a misfortune and it took away my husband. War took away the only breadwinner of our family,” Nadia says. That’s when Nadia started to search for work so she could provide for her two children.

“I needed a job and searched for days. One day, I went to my neighbors’ house to get some bread for my children and their TV was on. That’s when I saw an announcement for job openings with the Border Police,” recalls Nadia.

Nadia was hired. She had no professional experience but she quickly learned the ropes and IOM’s training courses were an opportunity to take her career a step further.

“These courses allowed me to acquire new knowledge in humanitarian border management and enabled me to gain self-confidence. I was eventually promoted to a higher rank,” says Nadia.

The UN Migration Agency, IOM, has helped to develop a specialized training curriculum for female border guards in Tajik and Dari languages. Additionally, it has supported efforts by the Tajik Border Force to improve their institutional gender policies, including recruitment and retention of female staff, as well as promoting equality in the workplace.

“Female border guards are trained to develop the same capacities as their male counterparts in attentiveness, observation, and responsibility to perform border control tasks at a professional level,” says Captain Donaeva Sayora, head-of-shift at the Khujand border checkpoint. “These joint trainings with Tajiks and Afghans help considerably in improving their skills and allow us to share our learned knowledge with them.”

“Statistical data of Border Forces of Tajikistan have shown that female border guards are often better than men when it comes to detecting human trafficking cases or deescalating conflict situations at borders,” says IOM Tajikistan Chief of Mission Dragan Aleksoski. According to a joint assessment conducted by IOM and the Tajik Border Forces, female border guards are reported to have sharper skills to detect forged documents, errors in identity documents of those who are under investigation, and to identify trafficked persons.

 “The training also helps them to share mutual concerns and exchange experiences of their work combating narcotics, human trafficking and instability in border areas,” says Aleksoski.“In recent years the number of female employees in the Tajik Border Force has almost doubled, demonstrating their value in creating a stable and well-managed border,” he adds.

As part of its wider efforts to promote women’s participation in border management in the region, IOM will continue to provide training to Afghan and Tajik female border guards through 2017 and 2018. It will also continue to train male border guards from both countries.

The post The Women Who Guard Afghanistan and Tajikistan’s Borders appeared first on USAIM.

Each year, thousands of migrants from the Horn of Africa region, over half of them children, risk their lives on this dangerous route through war-torn Yemen to seek better opportunities in the Gulf countries. Since January, IOM estimates that about 55,000 migrants, many of them from Somalia and Ethiopia, have embarked on this route. At least 114 migrants have died or are still missing off the coast, although the actual total is likely to be much higher.

On the morning of August 10^th, up to 180 Ethiopian migrants were violently forced into the Arabian Sea by human smugglers. IOM estimated that at least six of the migrants died, their bodies washed up on the beach, and another 13 remained unaccounted for. This tragedy occurred just one day after the presumed death of 50 Ethiopian and Somali migrants at the hands of smugglers during a similar incident off the Yemeni coast.

Our partner, IOM, discovered the migrants’ dead bodies on the beach. As a first responder to the calamity, IOM worked to provide food, water and emergency medical assistance to the survivors.

According to survivors’ testimonies collected by IOM staff, smugglers forced the migrants to squat in place for the 24-36-hour sea journey from Somalia to Yemen in order to increase the number of people that could be crammed into the boat. In some cases, smugglers tied the migrants’ hands together, rendering them powerless to escape.

“The utter disregard for human life by these smugglers, and all human smugglers worldwide, is nothing less than immoral. What is a teenager’s life worth? On this route to the Gulf countries, it can be as little as 100 USD,” said IOM’s Director General William L. Swing regarding the tragedy. “I am making a promise to them that IOM will not forget them and will continue to fight to protect the rights and dignity of future generations of migrants.”

The post Migrants Falling Victim to Smuggler Abuses off the Coast of Yemen appeared first on USAIM.

“We ran out of food and were left with ground wheat and the skins of the wheat we had stocked earlier,” Um Omar, said, adding that towards the end their meals consisted of boiled hay.

Another woman surrounded by her tired and restless children said she knew of families who were now cutting grass and wild plants they can find for food.

Nearly 85,000 children are still trapped as a result of the offensive to retake Mosul, and water supplies in the camps for the displaced are “stretched to the limits,” according to UNICEF.

But despite the hardships, the long walk to safety, the fear and hunger, for the many who arrive at Hamam al-Alil, it is as if they have been reborn again.

The new mantra or popular catch phrase amongst Iraqi internally displaced persons (IDPs) who succeed in escaping ISIL has become “Thank God, we are reborn again.” Not all, however, are as lucky.

In IOM’s field hospital located in Hamam al-Alil, young Abdul Rahman sobbed his heart out as he recounted the day his house came under ISIL mortar attack killing his elder brother and severely injuring his leg.

“I am afraid…” the skeletal 11-year old sobbed quietly from his bed at the field hospital. “I lost my leg,” he cried. “I wont be able to run or play football anymore.”

“My brother was sitting next to me, then the house came down on us and he was killed,” Abdul Rahman recounted, as he lay in bed with his right leg, amputated to a stump, just above the knee.

Unable to leave the house due to the hail of mortars being fired by ISIL on their neighbourhood that day, Abdul’s brother Ahmad (22) and a father of an 8-month-old baby, bled for four hours from his injuries before he eventually died.

Abdul’s father eventually managed to carry his injured young son Abdul Rahman and move him to another location. It took five days and five different locations before the young boy was eventually brought to IOM and Qatar’s Red Crescent field hospital where he could receive treatment.

By the time he arrived at IOM’s field hospital, despite the desperate efforts by surgeons to save his leg, the limb tissues to his severed arteries were dead and young Abdul Rahman’s leg had to be amputated.

As the Iraqi military forces close in on the Old City and the last remaining neighbourhoods, reports from the injured and escapees suggest that ISIL is tightening, what remains of its grip against the civilians.

“They are calling out from the mosque minarets, warning that they will shoot the children if families attempt to escape,” Um Ahmad said.

“They are even booby trapping our front doors to prevent us from escaping,” said Hassan who lay in one of IOM’s hospital beds recovering from injuries to his legs.

Unbeknown to him, ISIL had laid explosives at the entrance of his house. As stepped out to escape the explosives went off.

In another bed Saadoun stood vigilant moving from one bed to another checking on his two young boys: Qaws, a 3-year-old injured in the leg and Yassin 7, who was injured in the head.

Back in the Hamam al-Alil camp, where the family of seven members are crammed with relatives in a tent, he left three other children who are also injured. A bomb aimed at their neighbour’s house, which ISIL was occupying with the family as human shields, brought down his own house over their heads.

His five children were all injured, and his neighbours killed including a grandmother and two children. “I couldn’t dig out my neighbours from under the rubble,” Saadoun lamented sadly.

Some 12,500 people have been transferred from frontline areas to hospitals for trauma injuries treatment as of 20 May according to OCHA; including 6,369 people from West Mosul alone.

The post Thousands Continue to Flee West Mosul appeared first on USAIM.

As an Afghan woman who founded the country’s only coding school for girls, it was a painful but an important news event to watch unfold. It was as if my own personal story was finally brought into the national spotlight, and to watch its happy ending was deeply satisfying.

I was born an Afghan refugee in Iran during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. One year after the collapse of the Taliban regime, my family and I moved back to Herat. There, I went to high school and went on to earn my Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science before getting my Master’s from the Technical University of Berlin. Following my education, I returned to Afghanistan where I taught Computer Science at Herat University for almost three years.

As a female professor, I faced many challenges because of gender norms that dictate how women should behave and spend their time in Afghanistan. Our patriarchal society makes it difficult for women to walk in the street freely or laugh out loud – let alone teach and learn Computer Science.

During my teaching years at Herat University, I saw brilliant women with advanced degrees who were unable to find meaningful work that was commensurate with their studies and experience.

I knew that I needed to find a way to shift perceptions so that women could access fulfilling careers in Afghanistan. Allowing women to access the workplace could help position our country in the global marketplace.

So in 2015, I founded Code to Inspire, a U.S.-based nonprofit committed to teaching female students in Afghanistan how to code. Through Code to Inspire, I was able to open the first coding school for girls in Afghanistan.

All of this began while sitting at a coffee shop in Brooklyn, New York. While being so far away from home is painful, the world is, thankfully, wired through the magic of Internet. That is how I was able to found a coding school in Herat where Afghan women could be safe and have free access to a quality STEM education.

If girls are capable of coding and programming, their families and communities will realize that women should receive an education leading to satisfying careers. Once these women start earning an income and financially support the household, families and neighbors will begin, if ever slowly, to realize how much untapped potential they’ve been unknowingly living with. They’ll start to realize what we’re capable of.

The good thing about perceptions is that we can change them. They do not change overnight. It could be long and painful but change can happen.

Perceptions towards women in the West have shifted drastically in the past few decades, and economic prosperity has ensued as a result.

This is why changing the perceptions towards women and girls in Afghanistan is crucial to our country’s social and economic progress. Afghanistan is a war-torn nation and as a result education fell by the wayside, but as Rumi says “where there is ruin, there is hope for great treasure.” Our female coders are among our country’s greatest treasure.

When given the necessary tools to succeed, as witnessed with the robotics competition in Washington D.C., we enable our women to thrive. When they thrive, our society starts to notice and shift, if ever so slightly, their perception of women and their capabilities.

The post My Homeland’s Greatest Untapped Resource: STEM-Educated Women appeared first on USAIM.