The past two months have been full of activity and new ventures for Rain Collective. In June, Rain Collective’s founding director Jason, took a trip to both Egypt and Uganda. Rain Collective also hired a Repatriation Negotiator to work on the front-lines of cases impacting both Ugandans and Liberians who have been trafficked to the Gulf States.

Jason's recent trip to Egypt & Uganda was an amazing opportunity to meet with both current partners and new contacts. Read his report below:

Uganda

This quarter we have advanced two major initiatives in Africa. One of them in North Africa and the second in Uganda where we continue to work on victim identification. Our efforts in Uganda are focused on ensuring that women that return from the Gulf States who have experienced exploitation are identified as trafficking survivors. Together with Willow International, which is also a part of the Atlas Free network, we are networking with key government officials, migrant agencies, and survivors to build consensus around the most important questions to ask returnees from the Gulf States. While many of the key actors have different responsibilities which influence their points of view, all of them are seeking to ensure that survivors have safe migration experiences.

Through this process we are working to develop an objective tool that is validated and can be used to help identify women in need of support. Our hope is to continue supporting women in need and to begin to address root cause that will help decrease the number of individuals that are trafficked in the future.

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Egypt

In June, Nyera Ashraf was killed in broad day light in Egypt after resisting the advances of a fellow student at her university. Here is a link to an article on it by Al Jazeera (https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/6/21/egypt-arrests-suspect-in-gruesome-student-street-killing). The article highlights key voices on social media that are calling for everyone to take the rights of women seriously because not doing so results in these types of tragedies.

In partnership with the Evangelical Covenant Church, our work in Egypt focuses on the empowerment of women to overcome circumstances that were outside of their control. This often means broken relationships with their family members and their communities. We are currently working alongside Think and Do and Media Arts for Development to create new resources that help their staff members support women in these situations. In partnership with Kariz International, we are working alongside Media Arts for development to help communities identify traffickers in their midst.

We are pleased that the government has identified human trafficking as one of its key focus areas for its 2030 goals and will work to help support the government in those goals.