Women of Change Organization (WCO) | Initial Report from the “Beyond Survival” Programme
Women of Change Organization launched “Beyond Survival” in response to what the organization has identified as the growing and increasingly complex needs of women amid the war in Sudan—needs that do not end with surviving direct violence or escaping areas of active conflict.
For many women, displacement or refuge marks the beginning of another chain of risks: limited access to protection services, gender-based violence, loss of livelihoods, psychological and social distress, disruption of support networks, exposure to misinformation and hate speech, digital security threats, and reduced access to resources and spaces where decisions affecting their lives and communities are made.
It is within this reality that Beyond Survival was developed as a multi-track feminist intervention connecting protection, knowledge, rights, recovery, and women’s participation in peacebuilding.
What has emerged since applications opened and through the programme’s initial sessions confirms that the gap does not lie in women’s willingness to learn or participate. Rather, it lies in the limited availability of spaces, resources, and services compared with the actual scale of need.
More Than 2,000 Women Competing for 500 Places
Women of Change Organization received more than 2,000 applications, while the first season of the programme was designed to accommodate 500 women.
For the organization, the gap between the number of applicants and the programme’s capacity is not merely an administrative matter. It is an early indicator of the significant demand for knowledge, services, and safe women-centered spaces at a time when women are confronting multiple and overlapping consequences of war, while many existing interventions remain short-term, fragmented, or unable to reach everyone who needs them.
The organization therefore selected 500 women for the first season and divided them into smaller groups to preserve the quality of the training and create meaningful opportunities for interaction and participation.
Geographical diversity was taken into consideration during the selection process because women do not experience war in the same way, nor do they have equal access to services, information, and resources.
Nevertheless, more than 1,500 women remained beyond the capacity of the programme’s first season.
For us, these women are not simply “unsuccessful applicants.” They reveal an access gap that must be addressed.
For this reason, Women of Change Organization has decided to develop Beyond Survival through successive seasons rather than treating the first 500 participants as the endpoint of the intervention.
What Women’s Early Experiences Are Telling Us
The initial sessions revealed that a significant part of the risks women face stems not only from the existence of threats themselves, but also from limited access to preventive knowledge and reliable, practical information before harm occurs.
This became particularly evident during the programme’s digital security training.
Participants discussed experiences involving the loss of online accounts, difficulties recovering them, and limited knowledge of basic security measures. Discussions around sharing photographs, geolocation data, and secure communication also raised broader questions about women’s privacy and safety, as well as the safety of people within their personal and professional networks.For the organization, the conclusion is not that “women do not understand technology.”
Rather, women are using technology in high-risk environments without having equal access to the digital protection tools and knowledge required to navigate those environments safely This distinction matters.
The problem is not an individual deficiency among women that training must “correct.” It is a structural gap in access to knowledge, tools, and resources that can strengthen women’s ability to protect themselves.
Protection Cannot Be Fragmented
One of the core principles underpinning Beyond Survival is the rejection of approaches that treat women’s needs as separate and disconnected issues.
A woman facing a digital security threat may simultaneously be displaced or living as a refugee. She may be dealing with the consequences of violence and trauma, require referral services, face hate speech or misinformation, or already be playing an unrecognized role in resolving disputes within her community.
For this reason, providing digital security training without knowledge of rights and safe referral pathways is not enough. Providing psychosocial support without addressing protection risks and economic agency is not enough.
And discussing peacebuilding while women remain excluded from resources, opportunities, and decision-making spaces risks reproducing the very inequalities such interventions are meant to address. Beyond Survival therefore adopts an integrated approach to protection and empowerment.
From Identified Gaps to an Integrated Response
Based on the findings emerging from this initial phase, Beyond Survival operates through several interconnected tracks designed to respond to the different risks and needs revealed by women’s experiences of conflict.
Gender-based violence, PSEA, and safe referral pathways constitute one of the programme’s core areas. This track seeks to strengthen women’s understanding of their rights, different forms of violence, exploitation and abuse, the principles of confidentiality and “do no harm,” and ways of accessing services and referral pathways while protecting women’s dignity and safety.
Closely connected to this is psychosocial support, which is not approached as an expectation that women should simply adapt to the consequences of war, but as part of their right to recovery and access to care. The programme addresses psychological first aid, self-care, community-based support, and the identification of situations requiring specialized referral.
Digital security and secure communication treat phones, accounts, communications, and personal data as integral components of protection particularly in contexts where revealing a location, photograph, message, or conversation can result in consequences far beyond the digital sphere.
Through information verification and countering misinformation and hate speech, the programme strengthens women’s ability to access more reliable information, verify content, images, and claims, and understand how misinformation, disinformation, and incitement can affect personal safety and social cohesion.
The programme’s peacebuilding, mediation, and conflict management track begins from a clear position: women are not merely a population in need of protection. Women are already protecting families, resolving local disputes, supporting displaced communities, and sustaining social networks during conflict. Yet their contributions remain underrepresented in many formal peacebuilding and decision-making spaces.
This track therefore focuses on conflict analysis, mediation, dialogue, de-escalation, peacebuilding, and meaningful community participation.
Women and Emerging Technological Transformation
Beyond Survival also includes a dedicated track on artificial intelligence and emerging digital tools. As these technologies rapidly reshape education, employment, media, project management, and access to knowledge, there is a genuine risk that another inequality gap will emerge if women affected by conflict remain excluded from opportunities to access and use them.
This track therefore introduces participants to practical and responsible uses of artificial intelligence in learning, work, project and idea development, and access to information, while also addressing risks related to privacy, misinformation, and algorithmic bias.
The objective is not to teach technology for its own sake. It is to prevent war and displacement from creating a new form of exclusion that leaves women without access to the tools increasingly shaping future opportunities for employment, knowledge, and participation.
What Will Change in the Next Phase?
For Women of Change Organization, the first season is not a closed intervention operating according to a fixed design. What women tell us during implementation will directly inform the development of subsequent phases of the programme .
The organization will continue training the current groups across the programme’s different tracks while systematically gathering feedback on emerging needs and gaps and using that feedback to refine both the content and methods of delivery.
The programme will also expand through additional seasons to reach more women, while continuing to take geographical diversity and differences in local contexts into account.
Women of Change Organization also seeks to develop a model that does not measure success solely by the number of women who attended training sessions.
This is the shift women-focused programmes must make: from measuring attendance to measuring capacity, agency, and change.
What Beyond Survival Has Revealed So Far
The experiences of one group of participants cannot be generalized to all Sudanese women, nor does Women of Change Organization claim that more than 2,000 applications constitute a comprehensive assessment of women’s needs across Sudan.
However, the scale of the response, combined with what is emerging from the programme’s sessions, provides an important signal that should not be ignored.
Women are actively seeking protection, knowledge, support, skills, and opportunities, while the resources and institutional capacity available to reach them remain limited.
This gap places responsibility not only on women-led organizations, but also on donors, humanitarian and development institutions, and organizations working in protection and peacebuilding.
Investment in women during war should not begin and end with responding to harm after it has already occurred.
There is an urgent need to invest in prevention, knowledge, protection, mental health and psychosocial well-being, access to technology, women’s leadership, and women’s roles in peacebuilding and recovery.
Beyond Survival Is Not the End of the Crisis It Is the Beginning of Reclaiming Agency
War narratives often reduce women to what has happened to them:
- A woman who was displaced.
- A woman who lost someone.
- A woman who experienced violence.
- A woman who survived.
The feminist approach underpinning Beyond Survival begins somewhere else. What happened to a woman is part of her experience, but it should never become the sole definition of her future.
Women of Change Organization therefore does not want this programme to end with a report stating that 500 women completed a number of training sessions.
The change we seek is deeper:
- Women with greater knowledge of their rights.
- Women better equipped to protect themselves.
- Women with safer access to support and referral services.
- Women with tools for recovery and psychosocial well-being.
- Women with skills to develop sustainable sources of income.
- Women better equipped to navigate information, technology, and emerging digital tools.
- And women with greater space, confidence, and agency to participate in decisions and peacebuilding within their communities.
Beyond Survival is not simply about surviving war. It is about ensuring that survival becomes a starting point for protection, recovery, agency, and the ability to shape what comes next.