In the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), we are working in Goma, where single mothers are raising children entirely on their own, in communities disrupted by conflict. They have a voice, and what they have to say matters. Our oral history project, already underway, gives them agency over their stories, a platform to be heard, and access to basic needs, opportunities, and cultural engagement.

We are there. On the ground. We've started the work.

The Refugee Archive is building the world's largest oral history collection of single mothers and female-headed households living in displacement, a permanent, ethically collected record of testimony, culture, and survival. In the DRC, like many other countries, we partner directly with local organizations, working within a structured, consent-based program to record, translate, and preserve these testimonies.

Women who want to share their story have to clear obstacles just to participate.

What Your Gift Actually Covers

An oral history interview isn't a quick conversation. It runs for at least four hours, sometimes five or six, and unfolds over four to five days as trust is built and the full story developed through our proprietary pillar method. A trained Refugee Archive team member sits in for every minute of it, working through an English and French interpreter in a safe, clean space set aside for the interview itself.

Our on-the-ground partners receive approximately $560 a month to cover the direct costs of participation: food, child care, the purchase of a web-connected phone for widows and single moms who do not own one, mobile data, financial support to obtain or replace legal IDs, transportation to and from a secure interview location, and the cost of an interpreter on-site.

From there, a recorded conversation is preserved using digital encryption methods and storage, prepared for archival, unedited within a Special Collection at our university partner, including full native-language and English transcripts for accessibility to researchers and professional project research for all time. AI transcription alone isn't accurate enough for testimony this important, so a human being transcribes and reviews every interview by hand.

Archival is only the beginning. Each participant, or narrator, allows us to produce their stories in multiple parts and publish them across nine social media channels for use in our developing country youth art program, and adapted into written analysis for publication.

Add cloud storage, translation, subscriptions for production, training, coordination, and skilled human time and attention = a single completed oral history costs roughly $1,200 to produce, start to finish. Very little of that goes toward any individual's pay. Most of it covers what it actually takes to collect a story ethically and turn it into something permanent.

Institutional Archival
Testimonies are archived as a formal special collection, referenceable by researchers for years to come. That process is slow and genuinely labor-intensive: cataloging, transcription, and archival formatting that no single tool or click of a button can do on its own. It takes a combination of subscription-based tools and skilled people, and it's one of the most important places this campaign's funding goes, because a testimony that isn't properly archived doesn't outlive the news cycle in which it was collected.

The Art of Oral History
The Art of Oral History program is where youth artists from, mostly, developing countries, film themselves creating original art in their medium of choice, based on a transcript of one part of an oral history they are given, envisioning a artistic representation of the story. Those can be seen in all 2026 Oral Histories on our YouTube or Substack page.

DRC Youth-Driven Policy Tracker Program
The oral histories collected in Goma capture something no policy report currently does: a granular, first-person record of how national laws, public systems, and informal practices actually play out in the daily lives of displaced single mothers, and that level of detail is the foundation for a DRC Youth-Driven Policy Tracker, joining our existing programs in Nigeria, Kenya, and Lebanon, led by student researchers who are nationals of the country they study and who work from testimony and documented cases to analyze how policy functions on the ground for displaced female-headed households, gaining hands-on training in research methods, policy analysis, and writing along the way, and while that experience builds a real portfolio they can show future employers, the greater value sits in the reports themselves, which turn firsthand testimony into policy documentation built on evidence no one else has collected at this depth.

Investment in The Future
The information gathered through this work does more than fill an archive. It articulates a ground-level contextual understanding of how culture, religion, education, policy (informal and formal), programming, and procurement actually function in these communities. As we acquire more oral histories and testimonies and conduct collective analysis of emerging themes, we can design economic support projects, including the stages of a microlending initiative inside the female-headed household community we work alongside in Goma.

We've already done so much, and we are ready to do more. Consistency is key! It is our hope that you will join us, if not financially, in time, mentorship, partnership, skills, or sharing. We need you! This is a team effort.

Thank you for your support!
The Refugee Archive

Help 21 Single Mothers in the DRC Preserve Their Stories and Shape Change.

Twenty-one women living in the heart of conflict in the DRC can record and preserve their full oral histories if we raise $25,000 by September 20, 2026.