FIGHTING FOR CAUSES CLOSE TO HER HEART
ALL EYES ARE ON SOPHIE AS THE VISIONARY ROYAL BRINGS HOPE
She is one of the royal family’s unsung heroes, travelling the globe to support good causes, and last week was no different for the Duchess of Edinburgh.
Sophie was in Ethiopia to highlight two of the issues she is most passionate about – preventing avoidable blindness and raising awareness of the scourge of gender-based violence in conflict.
She began her week in Tigray, in the north of the East African nation, where she visited the Sabacare Internally Displaced People (IDP ) Camp, which houses more than 16,000 people – mostly women and girls forced to flee their homes due to civil war.
SPREADING JOY
Crouching down to chat to young girls and boys living at the Unicef camp, she brought smiles to their faces as she admired their clay models and joined in with their games.
The King’s sister-in-law was there at the request of the UK Foreign Office to hear how Unicef, the UN’s global agency for children, is fighting gender-based violence in the region.
The Duchess, wearing a striking blue floral dress by ME + EM, joined women and girls for a sewing session and visited a child-friendly area of the camp while hearing about the specialist support Unicef provides.
She also visited Ayder Hospital’s One Stop Centre for survivors of sexual violence, hearing about the counselling and medical treatments that are available, and at the Women’s Development Centre she met vulnerable women being helped to find independence and employment through learning new skills.
Since 2019, caring Sophie has championed the Government’s Prevention of Sexual Violence in Conflict Initiative as well as the UN’s Women, Peace and Security Agenda, and has visited survivors in Iraq, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Kosovo, Lebanon, Sierra Leone and South Sudan.
The second part of her visit to Ethiopia – to highlight the work of the international eyecare charity Orbis – came in her
