''A few days after starting this job, in September 2017, I went to Diffa in Niger, on the border with Nigeria, a place to which huge numbers of people, most of them women and girls, had fled from the Boko Haram terrorists who were wreaking havoc in their homelands. I met a woman called Achaitou, and her four young children. They were living under a plastic sheet. Achaitou was terrified of violence, especially fearful that she and her daughters might be abducted by armed men roaming over the border. To protect them, she took her children into the bush every night, risking disease and snakebites. A few weeks later I was in Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh, listening to the stories of women who had fled the violence of the Myanmar authorities in Rakhine. Stories of being forced to watch as their husbands, sons and fathers were killed. And then being themselves subject to the most extreme forms of rape and sexual violence. A few months later, I met Monga Albertine and her children, in a camp near the shores of Lake Tanganyika in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Her husband had been killed in tribal fighting, and she fled to try to save her children. She was trying to survive under a plastic sheet on a wet, slippery hillside, with not enough to eat, no school for the children and no way of making a living. And two months after that, I met a woman called Fatima in another camp in South Kordofan, in Sudan. She described the risks she took every day, gathering firewood in an area where women are frequently assaulted and raped. Most people caught up in humanitarian crises round the world are just like this. The majority are women and girls – although there are many men and boys too. Most of them are caught up in conflict. And the thing that makes it hardest to help them is how the men with guns and bombs behave in those conflicts. The world’s humanitarian agencies do a good job in saving lives and reducing suffering among people caught up in conflict. But we do not do a good enough job for women and girls. In my dozens of visits to countries caught up in crisis, the stories of women and girls have stuck with me more than any others. Stories of escape from violence and terror. Stories of barbaric acts committed against them. Stories of fear for their children and loved ones. But, stories also of resilience and hope. Women and girls defiant...''