Photo by RET Mali

Happy August from RET HQ in Geneva! And welcome back to Catch Up with RET – Our monthly newsletter where we shine a light on the stories and news that matters, and give a voice to individuals who are becoming more empowered each day through our programs. 

Want to make a difference? Among other things, $50 can…

• Help to assist women escape situations of domestic violence in Costa Rica and across the world
• Help a single mother in D.R. Congo send her children to school – for the entire year.
• Support a classroom for a month in Mbera refugee camp in Mauritania

For our U.S. supporters, we’re a 501(c)(3), and your donation may be tax deductible.

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Featured Photo

In the shade of a rural training site in the Ségou region of Mali, two young women proudly display jars of locally processed tomato products—fruits of their newly acquired skills in agro-processing. 

This image was taken during a July 2025 training session organized with our local partner ALPHALOG. Held in the communes of Sakoïba, Cinzana, Bla, Diena and Touna, the workshop introduced young learners from agricultural schools (CEP) to modern techniques for transforming, packaging, and preserving cereal and vegetable products. 

Among the 376 participants across six communes, nearly half were women, and 13 individuals identified as living with disabilities.

This activity is part of a broader effort to strengthen food systems and promote youth-led entrepreneurship in Mali’s rural areas under PAMSAA, or Projet Amélioration des Moyens de Subsistance et la Sécurité Alimentaire (Livelihood Improvement and Food Security Project).

Did you know we’ve been active in Mali since 2022? Click here to read more about our work there.

Impact Story: RET’s 2024 Global Report

Want to know where we had an impact last year? We’ve just published our 2024 Global Report, and it gives an inside look at our global operations, highlighting the stories of individuals and communities that have been transformed.

We helped communities across the Sahel improve their agriculture yields to promote food security, used language classes to bridge the divide between refugee and host communities in the Middle East, and ensured children’s fundamental right to education across Latin America.

In total, we directly impacted around 250,000 individuals across 25 projects in 15 countries.

Click here to the report today. And to stay up to date on our work throughout the year, subscribe to our mailing list.

In Brief

We’re on the ground in Latin America, the Middle East, Asia, and Africa. Here’s what our country teams have been working on in just the last month…

• In Peru, we celebrated Teachers’ Day under the banner of our Multiyear Resilience Program (MYRP) “Aprender Sin Barreras” (Learning Without Barriers), recognizing the teachers who have dedicated their professional lives to children and adolescents in vulnerable situations, including refugees and migrants. Read more about this initiative.
• In eastern D.R. Congo, families are returning home after years of conflict—and finding renewed hope. With support from Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) and in partnership with local NGO ACPEJ, we’re helping communities rebuild through hands-on solutions. More about the story here.
• RET in the News: “A record 520,000 migrants and asylum seekers crossed northwards overland from Colombia to Panama through the perilous Darién Gap in 2023, most of them heading for the United States.” Our team in Panama helped provide valuable insight and context to the complex situation there in this article from The New Humanitarian.

Longer Reads

Here’s a roundup of a couple articles that take a deeper dive into our work:

• As part of our ongoing work in eastern D.R. Congo to promote sustainable improvement of both the nutritional situation and peaceful and inclusive coexistence of conflict-affected areas, RET’s country team – in collaboration with local partners FDAPID and ACPEJ – organized activities to exhibit agricultural products from members of agricultural cooperatives created and supported by the Project.  Read the full article here.
• Alisa, a 54-year-old entrepreneur from China, embodies the transformative power of language learning and connection later in life. Having lived in Türkiye for over 15 years, Alisa had settled in Şanlıurfa due to work commitments, dreaming of starting her own business. Despite her long tenure in the country and many attempts to learn the language, she consistently struggled with Turkish and hadn’t found the right learning environment. Significant language barriers hindered her aspirations. Read more about her success story.

That’s it for this edition of Catch Up with RET, but before we close…

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