From Survival to Agency - How Entrepreneurship Can Support Women in Displacement

For World Refugee Day, this article examines how entrepreneurship training can support refugee women not only as income-generating activity, but as a pathway to agency, planning, self-reliance, and social participation. It argues that entrepreneurship support in displacement settings must go beyond generic business knowledge and respond to the behavioural, social, and structural barriers that shape women’s economic choices. Drawing on evidence from Personal Initiative training and move-eti’s implementation experience, the article shows why locally adapted, practice-oriented entrepreneurship training can strengthen women’s capacity to act while also creating practical links with host communities.

Rebuilding agency in displacement

Displacement is not only the loss of a place. It is the disruption of a familiar social and economic order: work, networks, income, mobility, language, recognition, and control over the future. For people forced to flee, rebuilding life requires more than safety and shelter. It also requires opportunities to regain stability, restore agency, and participate meaningfully in the economic and social life of a new environment.

This article focuses specifically on refugee women. Entrepreneurship can support people affected by displacement more broadly, but women often experience displacement through gendered responsibilities and barriers. Women in refugee and exile settings frequently carry responsibilities for children, families, food, care, and daily survival while facing limited access to capital, market information, mobility, childcare, formal employment, and financial services (UNHCR, 2023, 2o24; Al-Hamad et al., 2024).

For many refugee women, displacement means starting again under conditions of uncertainty. The market may be unfamiliar, the language may be new, social roles may change, and networks that once enabled work or income may disappear. Skills that previously created income may no longer translate easily into the local economy. In this context, the future becomes difficult to plan.

Humanitarian aid is indispensable. It saves lives and stabilises emergency situations. However, when displacement becomes protracted, survival support alone is not enough. Rebuilding life also means being able to work, use one’s skills, generate income (UNHCR, n.d.), make decisions, and contribute to the surrounding community.

This is where entrepreneurship matters: not as a standalone solution, and not as a replacement for protection, public services, legal rights, or financial inclusion, but as one practical form of agency. A small business can create structure, restore planning, and open a space for decision-making. It can help shift a person from waiting to acting, and from being seen only as a recipient of support to becoming an economic actor in her own environment.

Knowledge is not enough

Starting a business in displacement is difficult because the challenge is not only technical. A woman may have skills but no network. She may understand the idea of a business plan but not know how to test a product in an unfamiliar market. She may want to save or invest but lack access to finance, digital payment systems, or formal banking. She may be motivated but face restrictions linked to language, childcare, documentation, transport, safety, mobility, or confidence (Betts, et al., 2014).

These barriers show why entrepreneurship support in displacement settings cannot stop at business knowledge. A participant may learn what a business plan is and still not know how to act on it tomorrow. She may understand financial planning and still have no buffer. She may know that feedback matters and still not know whom to ask. The question is therefore behavioural as well as economic: how do people act when the environment is uncertain and resources are limited?

Personal Initiative training responds to this question by focusing on self-starting, future-oriented, and persistent behaviour. Rather than concentrating only on business knowledge, it trains participants to identify opportunities, anticipate obstacles, use existing resources, seek feedback, innovate, and continue despite setbacks. The objective is not only to understand entrepreneurship. It is to practise entrepreneurial action.

The evidence for this approach is strong. In a randomized controlled trial with 1,500 microenterprise owners in Togo, Campos and colleagues compared Personal Initiative training with traditional business training and a control group. Over four follow-up surveys across more than two years, Personal Initiative training increased monthly firm profits by 30 percent, while the impact of traditional business training was not statistically significant. The study also found that Personal Initiative training supported both women- and men-owned businesses and generated stronger effects on innovation, product diversification, and access to finance (Campos, et al. 2017).

Longer-term evidence also matters. A later follow-up revisited entrepreneurs from the Togo study after seven years and found lasting average effects of Personal Initiative training on profits. However, the long-term results were not the same for women and men. Men’s gains increased over time, while women’s gains became smaller and were more constrained by limited capital accumulation. This reinforces an important lesson for refugee and women-focused entrepreneurship programmes: behavioural training can strengthen agency and entrepreneurial action, but it cannot replace access to capital, markets, financial services, childcare, safety, legal rights, and enabling economic conditions (Campos, et al., 2025).

The lesson for refugee settings is therefore not that training alone can overcome exclusion. Rather, Personal Initiative can widen the room to manoeuvre. It can strengthen the capacity to act within difficult environments, while still requiring connection to broader systems of financial inclusion, market access, protection, and public support.

Entrepreneurship as a way to regain direction

Exile often involves a loss of control over time, income, social roles, and future plans. Entrepreneurship cannot erase displacement, but it can help restore part of that control. Having one’s own income, goals, and decisions can be deeply meaningful in displacement. Choices about what to buy, what to sell, whom to ask, where to go, and how to improve may look small from the outside, but in exile they are forms of self-direction (UNHCR, n.d.).

This is why entrepreneurship can support refugee women in regaining direction. It can create daily routines, practical goals, social recognition, and a renewed sense of contribution. It can help a woman see herself not only through what she lost, but through what she is building.

This also matters for host communities. Economic exchange creates everyday contact. When refugee women and host-community women sell to each other, buy from each other, share services, exchange information, or join the same training spaces, they create practical relationships. These relationships do not automatically remove social tensions, but they can reduce distance and create mutual dependence in ordinary life.

The World Bank’s work on refugee entrepreneurship and private-sector engagement highlights that forcibly displaced people can contribute as entrepreneurs, workers, suppliers, and business owners. Refugee entrepreneurship can support self-employment, create jobs for others, expand local private-sector activity, and strengthen host-community economies when legal, financial, and market conditions allow it (World Bank, 2023).

In this sense, entrepreneurship can support social cohesion not through slogans, but through repeated transactions and shared spaces of economic activity. Small economic links make the other community visible as customers, suppliers, neighbours, colleagues, and peers. In contexts where separation and scarcity can deepen suspicion, such everyday contact can become socially significant (Betts et al., 2022).

How we work: grounded in refugee settings, adapted with local partners

This is the space where move-eti works: translating evidence-based entrepreneurship methodologies into practical, locally adapted training that can be used in fragile and displacement-affected contexts. Across its work with Personal Initiative and STEP-based entrepreneurship training, move-eti focuses on adapting proven approaches to local realities while maintaining implementation quality and evidence-based standards.

At move-eti, we do not bring a fixed curriculum into displacement settings. Refugee contexts are shaped by uncertainty, language differences, disrupted livelihoods, limited resources, trauma, legal constraints, and the relationship between displaced and host communities. Training can only work if it starts from this reality.

We therefore work closely with local partners. They understand the market, the languages, the host community, and the daily constraints of participants. Together, we analyse what participants are already doing, what they need, what resources are available, and what barriers make action difficult.

The evidence-based Personal Initiative methodologies are then adapted to each context. The core remains action-oriented: participants practise, present, receive feedback, and apply the content to their own business or business idea. But the examples, exercises, language, pace, and facilitation style are adjusted to the community.

Local trainers are central to this process. They bring trust and contextual knowledge. move-eti brings the methodology, training structure, feedback tools, and quality-assurance system. Through Training of Trainers, pilot sessions, feedback loops, and supervision, the training becomes both evidence-based and locally grounded.

This is especially important for refugee women, because participation is shaped by factors that go beyond motivation alone. Language barriers, unfamiliar markets, legal and documentation challenges, disrupted social networks, childcare responsibilities, safety concerns, restrictions on mobility, and unequal access to finance all influence whether a woman can apply what she learns. Participants do not need abstract encouragement. They need realistic next steps that fit their market environment, available resources, and the realities of displacement.

What we see in practice

move-eti’s work shows that entrepreneurship training has to be adapted to the realities of each context. In refugee settings, this means paying close attention to language, disrupted livelihoods, limited resources, childcare, legal uncertainty, and the relationship between displaced and host communities. In wider women-focused programmes, it also means recognising how economic exclusion, discrimination, and weak access to finance shape women’s ability to act.

In Burundi, move-eti’s work under PACEJ illustrates why adaptation matters in refugee and host-community settings. Personal Initiative training is implemented across vocational training centres and refugee camp settings, reaching young women and men, including refugees. Practical implementation experience shows that training quality depends not only on curriculum, but also on whether participants can understand, practise, and apply what they learn.

In one refugee camp setting, the trainer used Kirundi, French, and Kiswahili to support participation. Language is not a technical detail; it decides who is included. If participants cannot follow the training, they cannot practise the behaviour. If they cannot practise, behavioural change becomes unlikely. The Burundi experience also shows that implementation quality is part of impact: electricity cuts, punctuality, different learning levels, children in the room, and feedback routines all shape the learning process.

In the Democratic Republic of Congo, TRANSFORME shows what scale can look like in women-focused entrepreneurship programming. While this project is not primarily a refugee-focused example, it demonstrates the strong demand for practical, action-oriented training among women micro-entrepreneurs. Based on move-eti internal monitoring data, Personal Initiative reached more than 23,000 women micro-entrepreneurs in active project cities, including Kinshasa, Kananga, Bunia, Matadi, and Mbuji-Mayi.

One anonymised story from the DRC makes this impact more concrete. A 45-year-old woman entrepreneur and mother of seven explained that before the training, she did not know how to plan, where to find financial resources, or how to follow up on her activities. After the training, she described a different relationship to her work:

“I now know how to organise my days and weeks. Through bootstrapping, I learned to use the equipment and resources I already had to improve my production.”

Her business changed, but so did her relationship to time, resources, and action. This is what Personal Initiative aims to strengthen: the ability to move from uncertainty to the next possible step.

In Serbia, move-eti’s work with Roma women adds another perspective on women’s agency under long-term marginalisation. This is not a displacement example and should not be presented as one. Its relevance lies in showing how entrepreneurship training can strengthen personal initiative, future thinking, leadership self-efficacy, and civic engagement among women facing structural exclusion. Based on move-eti internal monitoring data, preliminary evaluation results among 72 participants showed increases in Personal Initiative, future thinking, leadership self-efficacy, and social impact.

Taken together, these examples show why refugee women should not be approached only through vulnerability. They also show why entrepreneurship training must be practical, locally adapted, and connected to the wider systems that shape women’s opportunities.

What we have learned

Entrepreneurship training in displacement settings must be inclusive, precise, and connected to the social reality around it. It is not only a behaviour-change intervention. It is also a social-impact intervention. The networks built during and after training can strengthen social cohesion, create practical links between communities, and support women in dealing with difficult living and economic conditions.

At the same time, training must be connected to wider pathways for financial inclusion, including access to savings, credit, grants, digital payments, and market opportunities, so that women are not only encouraged to act but also have the resources to sustain and grow what they start.

Agency matters especially in exile. When life is shaped by uncertainty, the ability to act, plan, decide, and try again becomes more than an entrepreneurial skill. It becomes a way to regain direction.

Host communities should therefore never be an afterthought. When programmes support refugees without considering the host economy, they risk creating separation. When they include or connect host-community women, they can build shared economic spaces. This is where the win-win logic becomes practical: refugee women gain income, confidence, and networks; host-community women gain exchange, services, customers, and cooperation; and the local economy gains activity.

For move-eti, the lesson is clear. Women in displacement should not be treated only as vulnerable beneficiaries. They are potential entrepreneurs, organisers, providers, employers, customers, and community actors. The role of training is not to tell them this. It is to create the conditions in which they can act on it.

That requires evidence. It requires local partners. It requires adaptation. It requires quality. Above all, it requires respect for the fact that starting again is not only an economic process. It is also a social and psychological one.

When women rebuild the capacity to act, they do more than start businesses. They begin to reclaim a future.