Education & Mental Health for Conflict-Affected Families

About This Campaign

Displacement, loss, and years of instability leave marks that outlast any emergency: anxiety and trauma that go untreated, children who lose years of learning, families carrying stress. Across the regions where MFA works, mental health care and education remain among the least funded and least available forms of support.

In every setting where MFA works — Syria, Gaza, Ukraine, Türkiye — families live with harms that outlast the emergencies that caused them. Children out of school lose more than lessons; they lose structure, safety, and the sense of a future. Parents carrying untreated trauma struggle to provide the stability their families need. And the systems that would normally respond—school counselors, community mental health services, family support programs—are precisely the systems conflict dismantles first and rebuilds last.

MFA's answer is to engage the resources we already have: trusted clinics, local health workers, and community relationships built over more than a decade. Rather than creating separate mental health institutions, we are raising support to weave psychosocial care and learning into the services families already use and trust, so that seeking help carries no stigma, no extra journey, and no cost.

Perinatal Mental Health Focus

In Syria, more than one in four women screened at primary health centers show signs of postpartum depression — nearly three times the rate seen in high-income settings — yet mental health support is almost entirely absent from routine maternal care. Because a mother's wellbeing shapes her child's whole start in life, integrating screening and support into the antenatal care our clinics already provide is one of the highest-impact places this work could start.

Our Approach

The campaign builds on care MFA has provided across its regions — from a maternity hospital in besieged Southern Syria that served 500 mothers monthly, to clinics where maternal and child health services are among the most requested, to psychosocial support and community-based learning for conflict-affected populations.

Impact & Results

Your contribution helps build this programming service by service. MFA's clinic network in Syria — where antenatal care already accounts for roughly a quarter of all women's visits — offers a natural starting point, with the model designed to extend across the health programming we sustain in Gaza, Ukraine, and Türkiye. As programs launch, MFA will evaluate what works and share findings openly, so that community-based providers in any fragile setting can adapt the approach.