As NY1 continues its coverage of Women's History Month, the station profiles an organization that works to address the specific needs of refugee women and children, who make up about 80 percent of refugees worldwide. NY1's Shazia Khan filed the following report.

Aster Kidane was working with refugee women in Africa, but when war broke out between Ethiopia and Eritrea in the late 1990s, the Ethiopian national became a refugee herself and sought asylum in the United States.

"I was very depressed when I was processing my asylum, because I didn't know what the future was going to be," says Kidane.

She soon found her calling in her new home, as a volunteer and now a board member of the Women's Refugee Commission.

"The Women's Refugee Commission was founded 20 years ago by two very feisty women board members of the International Rescue Committee, which is our parent organization," says WRC Executive Director Carolyn Makinson. "They were going to humanitarian settings on board delegations and concluded that nobody that was speaking to the women, to the refugee women, and so that nobody was caring about the special needs and problems of women."

By speaking directly with the women, the WRC works to identify the problems and offer solutions to improve the lives of refugee women and children placed in detention centers in the United States, as well as those affected by conflict and natural disasters in mostly Sub-Saharan Africa.

Recently, the WRC has been efforting to safely distribute cooking fuel in humanitarian settings.

"Although the world food program is responsible for delivering food in refugee settings, nobody was responsible in the past for how women cooked that food," says Makinson. "So women and girls and would go out from refugee camps or other settings to collect firewood and roots and would be exposed to danger. And rape in those kinds of situations is just very, very prevalent."

Reproductive healthcare is also a top concern.

"It's always very challenging to hear women's stories, about walking seven hours in labor to get to the nearest health facility, and if they can't make it, being forced to deliver at home with no electricity, no water," says WRC program officer Lauren Heller.

Kidane says many of the refugee women they work with are inspirational women, who, despite their circumstances, are determined to move forward.

"They still concentrated on the solutions. Now we are here, we are still alive. We buried our husbands, our brothers, we buried our sons, but we have to go on," says Kidane. "So they are the ones who carry the torch for tomorrow."