Thank you for this wonderful question.
This is an issue that we've looked at closely and one that is extraordinarily important. What will hopefully change, as part of the wider women, peace and security agenda, is an understanding that demobilization programs traditionally have been targeted at male combatants. There was an assumption that women were simply not part of armed groups. We now recognize that this is absolutely not the case; there are often large numbers of women associated with non-state armed groups throughout eastern DRC. Many of these women are truly sexual slaves, although some have chosen to join or identify with the armed group they're in.
As you can imagine, many of these women also have children during their time with armed groups. Often, they face dire medical issues upon demobilization. However, we see that DDR programs—disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration programs—are simply not geared to addressing the needs of women. Often, girls simply don't receive the services that men do. They don't feel safe in the camps created for demobilizing combatants because they don't have a space dedicated to them.
We see that people don't have the capacity to address the health and reproductive issues that women face as a result of their time in armed groups and that many women are providers for a number of children when they demobilize.
One way to address this challenge is to think of ways of creating programming that explicitly addresses the needs and experiences of women who've been in these armed groups, from a health, psychosocial, and economic perspective. Currently, that is an enormous gap in programming.