Refugee Women's Health: Understanding Geospatial Barriers

In 2014, we worked with the Congolese refugee women to co-sponsor a series of workshops. The first workshop for Congolese female refugees explored how the community defined “health” in the broadest possible sense so that we could create a set of workshop topics that were of interest to this community. In coordinating transportation to and from the workshop, facilitators made the following observations:

• Most women did not drive, and transportation by non-family members was associated with the cultural expectation of sex as payment.
• Many participants did not know their home addresses, nor could they provide verbal directions to their homes.
• Many women were not familiar with city landmarks and could not use these as references in navigation.

These three observations are consistent with previous research. Therefore, we used geospatial mapping to determine where the refugee women lived and what the landmarks and facilitators were for them in accessing health care and basic necessities for living in a new country. This geospatial study established the basic spatial distribution of health-related and other resources in relation to refugee residences and assessed the adequacy of these resources in refugees’ immediate neighborhoods. Critical health-related services are frequently not in these boundaries; therefore, it is essential that health-related resources are located within these boundaries or are easy to access outside the known neighborhood for these women. In this poster we present findings from our study and illustrate the "resource deserts" in which many newly immigrated refugees find themselves.