Refugee Can Be is a refugee-led organization shaped by lived experience and built alongside the communities at the center of its work.

Our approach is grounded in listening. Girls, families, local educators, community partners, and Uganda’s Office of the Prime Minister have helped shape how Refugee Can Be works — from supporting girls in Rwamwanja Refugee Settlement to creating a pathway for secondary education in Kampala.

We bring lived experience and local knowledge together with a long-term commitment to girls and the futures they choose for themselves.

Refugee Can Be grew from founder Chantale Zuzi’s understanding that opportunity requires more than access to education. Her own experience showed her the importance of the people, institutions, and communities that surround a young person as she builds her future.

When Chantale returned to Rwamwanja, she brought that understanding into conversation with girls, families, local educators, and partners on the ground. Those perspectives shaped Refugee Can Be and continue to guide how the organization listens, builds, and grows.

Refugee Can Be builds long-term pathways that expand the choices available to refugee girls across education, leadership, economic opportunity, and life beyond displacement.

Our model brings together education, safety, health and well-being, belonging, mentorship, family partnership, skills development, and post-secondary opportunity—creating continuity as girls move through different stages of their lives.

Through this work, Refugee Can Be is building a refugee-led approach that can influence how communities, institutions, and systems invest in refugee girls: recognizing their agency, sustaining opportunity over time, and creating space for refugee leadership to shape the future.

Chantale Zuzi is the Founder and Executive Director of Refugee Can Be. Born in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, she spent part of her adolescence in Rwamwanja Refugee Settlement in Uganda before resettling in the United States.

Chantale’s relationship with education began with her mother, who did not have the opportunity to attend school herself but believed deeply in education for her daughters. Through displacement, Chantale saw how poverty, gender, and access shape the choices available to refugee girls. After resettlement, Chantale experienced sustained investment in her own life through education, mentorship, and community.

That perspective led Chantale to found Refugee Can Be, an organization shaped by the belief that displacement should not determine the choices available to a girl.

Today, she leads Refugee Can Be in partnership with girls and families from Rwamwanja. Their perspectives inform the organization’s decisions, programs, and direction. At the center of Chantale’s leadership is a belief in the agency of refugee girls: their capacity to make choices, shape ideas, influence their communities, and determine the direction of their own lives.

Your gift sustains the opportunities that allow refugee girls to continue their education, exercise their leadership, make choices about their futures, and pursue the lives they imagine for themselves.

Refugee Can Be does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, national origin, and ethnic origin and is committed to providing programs and a workplace free from racial discrimination.

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