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New online platform helps Turkish immigrant women abroad

The "Immigrant Women’s Solidarity Platform" connects Turkish women who are planning to move or have moved abroad, assisting them in settling down in their host countries.
Turkish women wave German and Turkish flags during a visit of Turkey's President Abdullah Gul in Osnabrueck September 20, 2011.  REUTERS/Ina Fassbender (GERMANY - Tags: POLITICS) - BM2E79K144D01

The increasingly popular online platform “Gocmen Anneler” (“Immigrant Mothers”) — or the “Immigrant Women’s Solidarity Platform” as the founders prefer it to be known in English — actively serves as the voice of Turkish women who seek a network, support and ways to share their experiences while living abroad. The results of the online survey “Immigration Routes” conducted with the participation of some 1,000 Turkish women who moved abroad in recent years were published at the end of March and provide fascinating insights into the experiences of these women.

“Gocmen Anneler,” founded by Pinar Erbas Erdurmaz and Esra Iyidogan Pencereci, started as a Facebook group in June 2017. They spoke to Al-Monitor and shared their story. The two businesswomen first met in Istanbul in 2007, and they soon became friends. Erdurmaz and Pencereci went through milestones in their lives around the same time — marriage, new jobs, children and moving abroad for their husband’s jobs, to Montreal and Dublin, respectively.

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