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According to the U.S. Committee for Refugees (2002) there were approximately 15 million refugees in the world in 2001, of which over three million were African. Refugees are persons who flee to a different country to escape persecution based on personal or group characteristics such as race, ethnicity, religion, nationality, social group, political opinion, or armed conflict, and lack of a durable solution (U.S. Committee for Refugees, 2001). For example, in Burundi, a small African country of about 6 million people, the civil war between the Tutsi and the Hutu has forced over half a million refugees to seek shelter in other African countries, Europe, and the United States (UNHCR, 2000).

Women and children compose the overwhelming majority of the people of the world in poverty across the globe. Suffer the LittleChildren: National and International Dimensions of Child Poverty and Public Policy, examines the burden of poverty on children, and the implications of that poverty upon the lives and future mobility of generations of children. One of the best aspects of this body of work is that it places the problem of child poverty in international context. In essence, the universality of child poverty is illuminated as well as the relationship between women's status and child poverty and, the greater likelihood that children of color, in particular, across the globe will live in poverty.