RefuSHE is the first and only organization of its kind. Since 2008, RefuSHE has served thousands of women, girls, and children through their award-winning holistic model. They provide the short and long-term support refugee girls need to become emotionally resilient and economically independent. Formerly known as Heshima Kenya, RefuSHE has grown alongside the young women they serve, ensuring that their programs are always for and by them.

Mission: RefuSHE protects, educates, and empowers orphaned, unaccompanied, and separated refugee girls and young women to build healthier and more resilient futures for themselves and their children.

Vision: They believe that every refugee girl, woman, and child deserves a life of dignity with equal access to safety, education, and economic prosperity.

Core Values: Heshima. (n). Swahili. respect, honor, dignity

RefuSHE serves one of the world’s most vulnerable populations – refugee girls. Their programs prioritize the needs of young refugee women and girls living in urban and peri-urban Nairobi who have been separated or orphaned due to war, conflict, violence, and drought. They have fled instability and persecution in their home countries across East Africa in search of protection and essential needs like clean water, food, shelter, and health care. 

Urban refugees who live outside of designated refugee camps have less access to resources and face unique risks. Unaccompanied refugee girls and young women are particularly vulnerable to sexual and emotional violence, physical abuse, domestic servitude, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), depression, illiteracy, forced or early marriage, early pregnancy, Female Genital Mutilation (FGM)/Female Genital Cutting (FGC), xenophobia, extortion, human trafficking, and persecution from host communities.