“The war in Syria was devastating for so many people, but I felt like the female experience of war wasn’t really being told. It was bold, but I just thought, ‘I’m going to go’.”
Journalist Sarah Little is talking about the decision to leave her undergraduate degree in Chicago in 2017 to travel to the Middle East to interview women and girls who had been displaced by the war.
“I had grown up partly in the Middle East. We moved to Qatar when I was 11 and I had been to 40 countries by the time I was 18. I was exposed to how women live all over the world from a pretty young age.”
“I knew of an organisation on the ground in Jordan, and they granted me access to Za’atari refugee camp, which at its peak housed 150,000 Syrian refugees. I would commute to and from Amman several times a week to the camp for a couple of months, meeting girls and hearing what struggles they faced. That was a defining period of my life.”
“A lot of journalists would go into the camp, write-up a story and then leave, whereas I kept going back every day, to sit with the girls in their homes, listening to their stories.”
“I ended up taking a couple of years off my undergraduate studies to travel in the Middle East and in sub-Saharan Africa and in Europe, meeting with young women and girls.”
After graduating from City St George’s MA International Journalism in 2022, Sarah returned to Jordan where she conducted a study of 1,600 women in the country.
“I found that a third of them were locked in at home – they weren’t allowed to leave. I pitched that story to several news outlets, and although the Guardian did eventually publish it, it took some convincing. I remember thinking, ‘Why is it so difficult to get this story published? It’s affecting millions of women.’ That catalysed me to want to make the More to Her Story newsroom – to transition it from an Instagram account, into a serious news outlet reporting on women and girls around the world.”
The More to Her Story site now reaches an average monthly readership of 3 million people.
“The numbers have just skyrocketed over the past year, and each story is averaging hundreds of thousands of readers. I think there’s a gap in media, generally, around women’s stories. Some of the biggest newsrooms have dismantled their gender divisions in recent years. Especially now at a time when women’s rights are backsliding around the world there’s a need for understanding women’s lives and stories. People see that.”
“Incredible journalists are now wanting to write for us. It feels like a full circle moment because I remember right after City, all I wanted to do was write about women. I would be knocking on doors trying to get a job writing about women and I couldn’t get one. That was also a catalyst for me to do my own thing.”
Sarah has been named one of Forbes 30 Under 30 for Media for 2025.
“It is surreal because that was a bucket list item for me. It’s an affirmation, and nice to feel validated – I was just doing the work to try and get these stories told. To have this recognition and that people are paying attention, you realise it is making an impact.”
“The goal over the next year is to continue growing More to Her Story and hiring more people. We have some exciting publishing partnerships coming up which will help broaden our reach further. I recently got a book deal from Georgetown University Press to write about women entrepreneurs in the Middle East and North Africa, and I’ll spend a month travelling around the region, interviewing women.”
“More to Her Story has made so much progress over the last twelve months, and I’m really excited to see where it goes next.”