A new adventure in Washington

Given my 3+ year service with the Peace Corps (Guinea and Madagascar), many people expected that I would spend my summer back on the African continent. Instead, I will be in Washington DC for an adventure new and different to me - interning with the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration in the Office of Assistance for Africa. I look forward to linking my on-the-ground experiences from Peace Corps with the policy analysis tools I have learned during my first year of graduate studies at the Harvard Kennedy School.

I would like to thank the Nancy Germeshausen Klavans Cultural Bridge Fellowship and the Women and Public Policy Program at the Harvard Kennedy School for their generous support.

Project Description
This summer Molly Byrne will intern with the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration (PRM) in the Office of Assistance for Africa (AFR) in Washington D.C. Molly will assist the Central Africa Program Officer in improving protection and assistance programs in the region including more than 300,000 refugees and 1.3 million internally displaced persons from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Specifically, Molly will look at the issue of sexual violence in eastern DRC and will provide policy recommendations to the PRM office on how PRM should respond to the needs of women who have been victimized and how PRM can empower women to prevent or mitigate sexual violence in the future. Molly will also help in the allocation of funding to respond to gender-based violence (GBV) in refugee populations throughout Africa.