Samantha was born and raised in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). In 2007, escalating insecurity forced her to flee with her children to Uganda, a country that hosts more than 1.7 million refugees. “We left the country because of the war,” she says. As a single mother of four children, Samantha needed a source of income in her new host community. Uganda has an inclusive policy for refugees, but only 29 percent can access formal employment, while 72 percent run small businesses. Faced with this reality, Samantha learned how to cut and style hair, and opened her own salon in Kampala.

A bumpy ride

Like many other women fleeing conflict in their homeland, Samantha lost her sense of stability. Refugees contend with temporary living arrangements, crowded settlements, and often, a dependence on handouts. In the settlement setting or new host community, many struggle to make ends meet. That transformation is hard, yet when they land in their new host communities, they seek hope and opportunities to rebuild their lives.

Starting a small business is a livelihood opportunity and can be the beginning of a journey to self-reliance for refugees. However, it also has its share of challenges. Refugee microentrepreneurs struggle to access capital to start and grow their businesses due to inadequate funding for settlement businesses and the limited purchasing power of their customers, who are also refugees. Additionally, since refugees venturing into entrepreneurship is largely driven by necessity, meeting household needs usually takes priority over business expansion.

The game changer

Women and girls constitute 51 percent of the refugees in Uganda, and like Samantha, about 32 percent of all refugees are from the DRC. In Kampala, where up to 5 percent of Uganda’s refugee population resides, global nonprofit Accion partnered with local service providers, bringing together different actors from across the small business ecosystem to address business challenges faced by refugees. Our main objectives were to enable women refugees to access new income-generating opportunities and critical enablers such as working capital and training. We also sought to strengthen the capacity of local financial service providers to better understand and serve the needs of refugees.

Between 2022 and 2024, Accion implemented a pilot project with UGAFODE Microfinance Limited (MDI) and Soko Uganda, an online marketplace,  supported by the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation.  Using the ecosystem approach, we examined the challenges faced by women refugee microentrepreneurs and identified stakeholders in the market who could help resolve them while creating a lasting impact. Our analysis revealed that most of the support provided to refugee microentrepreneurs did not address all their needs, either due to resource constraints or support programs that were limited in scope. With this in mind, we brought together refugee associations, an online marketplace, and a microfinance institution as partners to create a shared understanding of the solutions that were needed. The service providers were intentional about putting the women refugee entrepreneurs at the center of any products or services that are developed. 

We provided training that was gender-conscious and in a language that the microentrepreneurs were comfortable with. The training covered financial literacy, distribution strategies, sales, and marketing. The women acquired digital skills and joined Soko Uganda, which enabled them to broaden their market, start accepting digital payments, and eventually, credit to scale their businesses, from UGAFODE. We used the ecosystem approach to establish a mutually beneficial relationship between the two partners, introducing a new pool of potential customers while the microentrepreneurs gained access to new markets and financial services.

“Soko Uganda provided different trainings, like business training. They also brought UGAFODE on board,” says Samantha, whose Soko Uganda account is linked to her UGAFODE bank account.

Samantha is one of the nearly 750 women refugee microentrepreneurs who were trained and onboarded onto the online marketplace. More than 300 women also accessed financial services, including savings accounts, which were modified to meet the needs of refugees. Some microentrepreneurs saw their household incomes grow due to increased business revenue.

Successes and challenges

First, our pilot on making a case for refugee financial inclusion and orchestrating partnerships to serve them succeeded in having partners continue to provide services even after it ended. Secondly, the willingness of the online marketplace staff to support women was instrumental in increasing the visibility of their businesses. A few microentrepreneurs reported having walk-in customers who had first seen their products online. Thirdly, the financial service provider’s flexibility in modifying an existing product enabled almost half of the women who were onboarded to the platform to open a savings account. However, the results showed that additional effort was needed to increase the number of women taking credit. In most cases, savings are usually the first step towards financial inclusion for excluded populations.

Our experience shows that the ecosystem approach to enabling entrepreneurship among refugee women accelerates the systemic change required for lasting impact. When mutually beneficial partnerships are formed between collaborators in the ecosystem, and the entrepreneurs are enabled to use existing or new products or services, growth continues with minimal or no additional support. This means that programs aimed at dignified work, providing livelihood options, fostering self-reliance, or building refugees’ resilience can deploy this approach to scale impact and bring transformational changes in host communities.

Conclusion

The ecosystem approach to fostering partnerships, which simultaneously enables refugee women to engage in entrepreneurship and financial inclusion, shows great promise. Samantha remains hopeful that the extra exposure from Soko Uganda’s platform and in-person sales exhibitions, combined with access to her UGAFODE account to manage transactions, will increasingly help boost her business.

“It’s good that we are introduced to these financial institutions, and we know what we can do with time,” she says. “Because if you’re coming here as a refugee, you’re starting over entirely. So you need some support.”

In exploring this approach, we also found that scanning the business environment for the right enablers is crucial for success. Though this was done on a small scale in one of the countries with the largest refugee populations in Africa, there are opportunities to expand this approach to other refugee settlements and towns.