When Survival Absorbs the Sale

What does it mean to build a business while rebuilding a life?

This was the question sitting quietly beneath our field day for the Her Economy project.

Her Economy seeks to understand and profile refugee women’s businesses across Kampala by documenting the kinds of work they do, how their businesses operate, and the challenges they face. The project is not only about gathering information. It is also about visibility and support. Through these profiles, we hope to better understand where support is needed and contribute toward a directory where customers and communities can discover and support refugee women-owned businesses.

On this field day, we met nine women.

Their businesses existed across different corners of the city. Some worked from markets, surrounded by movement and passing customers. Others sold from their homes, where business and domestic life occupied the same space.

Many sold vegetables: tomatoes, onions, carrots, and potatoes arranged carefully for daily trade. Others sold jewellery or kitenge fabric brought from the Democratic Republic of Congo. Some made what they sold themselves, turning fabric, ribbon, yarn, and skill into clothing and handmade bags.

At first glance, these businesses appear different. Yet beneath them were shared questions about work, stability, and survival.

One of the clearest patterns was the challenge of customers.

Nearly every woman spoke about difficulty finding enough buyers. For those selling vegetables and other perishables, this carried particular urgency. Goods do not wait. When produce remains unsold, income disappears with it.

Again and again, conversations returned to money, not as abstraction, but as material necessity.

Many women wanted to expand what they sold or diversify their goods but lacked the capital to do so. Traders needed money to purchase more inventory and increase variety. Women producing handmade goods needed materials to continue creating and growing their work.

Yet income rarely remained inside the business for long.

Money earned through sales quickly became school fees, rent, food, and healthcare. Business income moved directly into sustaining family life, leaving little room for reinvestment. Growth, while hoped for, often competed with immediate responsibility.

Many women also spoke about place.

Several currently sell from home or informal market spaces and expressed the desire for more stable locations where they could consistently meet customers and build their businesses with greater security and visibility.

What stayed with me most, however, was not only the conversation about hardship.

It was the conversation about sharing.

Among the women making handmade products, some expressed a desire to teach other women the same skills they had learned. Their thinking moved beyond individual business success and toward something collective: if another woman learns the trade, she too can earn, provide, and create possibilities for herself and her family.

There is something important in that instinct.

Too often, refugee economies are spoken about only through need. But this field day reminded me that these businesses are also spaces of knowledge, skill, adaptation, and exchange.

The Her Economy project begins with profiling, but it asks larger questions too.

What kinds of businesses are refugee women building? What systems help them grow, and what barriers hold them back? And perhaps most importantly, what changes when these businesses become more visible to the people who may wish to support them?

Across Kampala, refugee women are already participating in the economy, creating livelihoods with the resources available to them and carrying responsibilities that extend far beyond the marketplace.

Perhaps the question is not whether these businesses matter.

It is whether we are paying attention to them.