Building from Nothing: How refugee-led enterprises are turning exclusion into opportunity
Refugee entrepreneurs are building brilliant business models and innovative products and services. Are investors ready to support them?
- Blog
- All impact sectors
- Cross region
The smoke got into everything.
It got into Solomon Bhaghabhonerano’s clothes, his food, the walls of his small home in Uganda’s Kyaka II refugee settlement. It got into his mother’s lungs, too. He remembers her coughing and coughing from the indoor fire where she cooked food and purified water.
By the time Bhaghabhonerano was old enough to understand what was happening, he was already missing school to search for firewood, trudging further from home as the forests around Kyaka II thinned and the wood grew scarce. Eventually he stopped going to school altogether for more than two years, trading his education for a resource that was making his family sick.
“I would ask myself, is this what it means to become a refugee, that you have to go through these challenges?” he says. ”For me, it created a deep pain within me, but there was nothing I could do back then.”
Bhaghabhonerano returned to school and went on to earn a bachelor’s degree in environmental forestry. At university, he learned that his experience as a boy was common in refugee settlements across Uganda. Determined to change that reality, he founded Live in Green, which aims to restore forests and improve health by planting trees and selling energy-efficient cookstoves that run on eco-friendly briquettes rather than wood or charcoal.
The cookstoves reduce household fuel consumption by up to 60% and virtually eliminate toxic indoor smoke. They also eliminate the need to chop down trees. Instead, Live in Green employs teams of refugees to collect organic waste like banana peels, maize cobs, and agricultural clippings and transform them into briquettes and compost manure. Today, Live in Green has a staff of 25, produces 20 tonnes of briquettes per month, has sold more than 6,000 of its Eco-Green Cook Stoves, distributed nearly 2 million seedlings, and restored 26 hectares of forest around Kyaka II.
“Growing up in a refugee settlement, I learned that durable solutions were not given priority. It forged this conviction that if we want to solve the problems, we have to do something ourselves.”
Solomon Bhaghabhonerano, Live in Green Founder
Enterprise over aid
There are more refugees today than at any time in human history. Protracted conflicts across the globe, combined with the worsening effects of climate change, have forcibly displaced more than 120 million people around the globe. According to some estimates, by 2050 more than a billion people will be forced to leave their homes. That will represent roughly 10 percent of the world population.
As the crisis worsens, humanitarian aid alone has proven insufficient to meet the scale of need. That was already the case before the U.S. started slashing foreign aid commitments. As countries like Germany, Sweden, and the UK followed suit, humanitarian relief fell between 35 and 40% in 2025 alone. What funding remains tends to be directed at short-term, emergency problems. And yet data suggests that once people are forcibly displaced, their average length of displacement is 20 years.
That’s not an emergency, it’s a lifetime. And it demands solutions that can last as long.
A new wave of displaced entrepreneurs is rising to meet the challenge. Their enterprises cut across a wide range of sectors and span from micro-enterprises like tailor shops and bakeries to established businesses with hundreds of employees. One thing they share in common: These entrepreneurs are building in their own communities, selling products and services that solve local problems.
Take the energy and digital divide. When Acumen Fellow Innocent Tshilombo arrived at the Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya as a 20-year-old fleeing war in the DRC, he discovered that the camp was cut off from electricity and Internet. So he founded Kakuma Ventures, which sells solar home systems and WiFi equipment on credit to refugees from Sudan, Somalia, DRC, and elsewhere. Those refugees can then start their own micro-enterprises by selling Internet subscriptions to their neighbors. Kakuma Ventures holds the subscription revenue until the cost of the equipment is paid off, at which point the subscription income becomes profit for the micro-entrepreneur.
Today, Kakuma has 18 employees and 32 micro-entrepreneur partners while providing Internet access to more than 11,000 people.
“This is what we want to show to the world, that the refugee settings are also a market that should be addressed.”
Innocent Tshilombo, Acumen Fellow and Kakuma Ventures Founder
Market access is another stubborn barrier. In Rwanda, where rain cycles have become more unpredictable and devastating floods now give way to debilitating droughts, smallholder farmers and those displaced by natural disaster often have no reliable way to sell what they grow. Acumen grantee Afri-Farmers Market helps solve this problem by connecting farmers directly to customers through its e-commerce platform. It also provides training and inputs to improve yields. With more income, smallholder farmers can implement irrigation systems or greenhouses or even buy crop insurance, which Afri-Farmers Market sells.
“This is about alleviating poverty and ensuring food security. It’s also about improving climate resilience.”
Norman Mugisha, Afri-Farmers Market Founder
Then there is education and employment, perhaps the deepest and most durable challenge. In Uganda and South Sudan, the Africa Youth Action Network “brings young people together so that they can be the change they want to see in the world,” says Simon Marot Touloung, an Acumen Fellow and AYAN’s co-founder and executive director.
Touloung fled South Sudan when he was just eight years old and at risk of becoming a child soldier. He walked for three weeks with little food or water until he arrived at the Keri transit center, where he was transported in a UNHCR truck to Imvepi Refugee settlement in Uganda. There, he continued to walk 14 kilometers a day just so that he could attend primary school.
“Where I come from, we are looked at as people who are causing the problem,” he says. “As people who go and cheat, who go and fight. But we look at refugees as people who can actually transform their own communities if they’re given the right platform and the right tools.”
Through its Refugee Pathpreneur Project, African Youth Action Network identifies promising young refugee entrepreneurs, with a particular emphasis on women who are already running small businesses and ready to scale. It provides them with seed funding and mentorship to take their ventures to the next level. Since 2015, AYAN has supported 175 refugee-led businesses and impacted more than 5,000 youth.
Likewise, Umoja for Peace and Resilience works in refugee camps in Uganda and the DRC to help residents access decent work and build sustainable livelihoods. It starts by offering vocational training in everything from carpentry and bricklaying to welding and hairdressing. It also offers classes in social innovation and a formal entrepreneurship program complete with starting capital and mentorship.
“We need to address refugee problems from an opportunity perspective. If you bring this perspective that we can work and support ourselves and even change our communities, it has a profound impact.”
Isaac Ashige, Acumen Fellow and Umoja for Peace and Resilience Founder
A recent cohort of 16- and 17-year-old young women in Umoja’s U-Innovate program identified the problem of pollution in their settlement and, with the help of recycling experts and $25,000 in raised funds, launched a start-up called Brilliant Plastic. The environmental enterprise turns plastic bottles into furniture and plastic bags into school bags for children and faux leather purses for adults. Brilliant Plastic now sells their products in both the camp and surrounding host community – an important step toward reaching larger markets and making the business more sustainable.
“These young ladies are expanding,” says Ashige. “They have hired people to collect plastic waste. Others are working in design or sales. It’s a reminder why we have to do what we are doing.”
The importance of Patient Capital and partnership
Brilliant Plastic’s work in the host community points to a broader truth about refugee entrepreneurship. Camp-based markets, constrained by limited employment and low purchasing power, can only take a business so far. Reaching host communities and wider markets is often what separates a promising idea from a financially viable enterprise.
Getting there requires capital and partnership, and finding the right kind of both has proven to be one of the most persistent challenges refugee entrepreneurs face. Impact funds, microloan lenders, and development finance institutions are stepping up to support refugee-led enterprises. The Refugee Investment Network tracks over 20 refugee-focused investment vehicles in their recent report and is capturing growing investments in their new tool.
Acumen is proud to be part of the movement. In 2022, we launched our FDP Lens Investing Initiative, which committed to investing $4.9 million in refugee-focused businesses in East Africa. Four years later, that capital has now reached more than a dozen companies with capital, technical assistance, or capacity building. Our recent report, From the Margins to the Market, tracks that investment and shares deeper insights from our experience.
Despite this growing activity, the reality on the ground remains bleak for many refugee entrepreneurs, especially when it comes to finding patient capital and partners who give them the time they need to refine a business model, build a team, and deliver a return.
“What do we want from a partner? The number one thing is their flexibility and their understanding.”
Isaac Ashige, Acumen Fellow and Umoja for Peace and Resilience Founder
Ashige points out that external partners have long sought to bring their solutions and impose them on refugee communities. “For so long they are not working, but still they keep on forcing,” he says. “So we want a partner who is going to provide capital that is flexible, either to support the work that we are already doing or some of the concepts that we want to develop.”
Norman Mugisha of Afri-Farmers Market says that finding flexible capital is challenging even for an established business like his. One investor demanded that, as a pre-condition of its $500,000 investment, Afri-Farmers Market couldn’t change its business model, even though expanding into marginalized communities inevitably requires adaptability and experimentation.
“VCs want to see something that’s purely tech-enabled,” he says. “But we’re talking about people who often don’t have smartphones or electricity. It has to be a gradual process.”
“We need you to trust us and work with us so that we can actually change the communities we’re living in,” echoes Touloung of Africa Youth Action Network. Forging partnerships with local organizations is vital for the overall effectiveness of refugee-lens investing, he says, noting that when AYAN announces that it has capital available for entrepreneurs, suddenly everyone is starting a business.
“You need one or two years to know whether an entrepreneur is really doing it for the future sustainability of the organization or just doing it for the funds,” he says. “That’s why we need a partner to give us that long-term commitment and that flexible funding.”
Back at the Kyaka II refugee settlement in Uganda, Solomon Bhaghabhonerano is proud of how far Live in Green has come and how much good it has done. Despite this success, he recognizes that its production capacity is insufficient to meet the energy needs of Kyaka II, let alone every refugee community across Uganda.
His team currently fabricates every stove itself, welding it together on-site. Their design outperforms eco-stoves from China, but they aren’t as beautiful to look at. They also lack technology to track how much carbon emissions they save, which would allow Live in Green to apply for carbon credits and scale more quickly.
“If we are supported, imagine how much we could do,” says Bhaghabhonerano.
More from our Knowledge Hub
Acumen invests in ScrapUncle to bring transparency and dignity to India’s recycling economy
ScrapUncle’s tech-enabled platform connects households, workers, and recyclers to formalize one of India’s most fragmented supply chains.
