World Food Programme enables refugee and local women to challenge gender norms in conservative pastoralist communities
Sadiya starts her day early by letting out her goats from her backyard barn at Bokolmayo refugee camp, a collection of makeshift houses in Ethiopia's Somali region. Whistling cheerfully, she leads them first to a water point nearby, then farther away to find a good grazing spot amid the cracked land.
Businesswoman
With her flowing blue robes, the 25-year-old refugee from Somalia is a rare sight among pastoralists who dominate this slice of eastern Ethiopia, where men traditionally oversee livestock rearing.
"It is not easy to be in this business as a woman," says Sadiya. (As a refugee, her last name is withheld). "When we started, many people told us not to waste our time and money as we would surely fail."
Sadiya's assessment reflects the complex social fabric of Ethiopia's predominantly pastoralist Somali region. Here, women are often confined to age-old roles such as taking care of household chores and children. Their involvement in public life and decision-making is limited.
Refugees like Sadiya, whose family fled fighting in her homeland more than a decade ago, face further challenges. They do not have access to land, job opportunities, or financial services such as loans.
Entrepreneurship
But an initiative that builds skills, incomes and social cohesion among locals and refugees is challenging the status quo - and offering new economic opportunities in one of Ethiopia's poorest areas.
Supported by the World Food Programme (WFP) and international nonprofit Mercy Corps, it has enrolled some 1,000 mostly female participants in refugee camps across the Somali region, including Bokolmayo.
Empowering women is central to the initiative, which gives them training and leadership in start-up businesses, while their male counterparts play contributory roles. But it aims to lift up entire communities, in a region where climate-intensified droughts and floods have led to soaring hunger.
"The programme focuses on entrepreneurship, where women select businesses that they want to engage in," says Daniel Ocom, WFP resilience programme officer for the Somali region. "Once the businesses are set up, we provide them with different trainings that equip them with skillsets to sustain thriving businesses."
Savings cooperatives
Since the project was first launched a few years ago, some 600 women have established their own businesses and formed 24 registered business cooperatives.
The initiative links them to sustainable markets to sell their products and services. Participants have also created village savings-and-loans associations, in which members pool money to lend and invest in business projects.
"Access to markets and financial services is a game-changer for many women in this region," Ocom says. "From our interventions, we have seen first-hand that the women in these areas have many innovative ideas. When linked with the right markets and given financial access, they will be able to build profitable businesses."
That's the goal at Bokolmayo, where Sadiya is chair of the camp's cooperative union: 25 women and five men who have pooled their resources, and matched their savings with WFP start-up capital, to launch their own small businesses, as well as invest in a jointly owned livestock trading venture.
After tending to her goats, Sadiya heads to the weekly meeting of her cooperative, Hodan, which means wealth in Somali.
When the group first started, meetings would often be held in the tree-shaded backyards of a member's house. Now, the participants have invested their business profits in building a corrugated metal house that they lovingly call their 'headquarters.'
Sadiya kicks off the session with a roll call. Next, the members tally last week's sales and decide on how much to save, and what type of livestock to invest in.
"Many of the skills we have now, we gained through WFP's trainings," says Sadiya, who started her own goat-breeding and trading business last year. Her new career is a source of hope for the mother of seven, who married young.
"They trained us on how to save," she adds, "how to develop our business, how to buy and sell livestock, and how to share information within the cooperative."
The project is also nurturing ties between the region's refugee and host communities, who share the same language, history and ancestors.
At Hilaweyn refugee camp, some 50km southeast of Bokolmayo, local trader Unah Ibrahim Mahmud has set up a clothing business in the camp. She is part of the 25-member, majority-women Wadajir cooperative, which includes both refugees and Ethiopians like herself.
"Business is good," Ibrahim says of the group, whose members sell food and non-food products at the camp, which previously had very few traders. "As a cooperative, we support each other and always share our experiences."
Gender equality
Beyond business training, the programme offers sessions - open to participants and their families - on issues like gender equality, land inheritance, division of home labour and women's participation in public spheres.
"When we first started, some women's husbands came to us and asked for their wives' shares without the wives' knowledge," says Sadiya, from the Bokolmayo camp. The men also accused cooperative members of stealing their spouse's money, she adds.
"Now they are saying that we are making good progress and encouraging us," Sadiya says.
Sign up for free AllAfrica Newsletters
Get the latest in African news delivered straight to your inbox
Another Hodan cooperative member, Mouslima, agrees the sessions have changed perceptions.
"Before the training, many people in our community thought women should take care of their families and stay at home," says Mouslima, who is also a Somali refugee. "Now we all know that mothers can also earn an income and support their families - and fathers should support mothers."
Mouslima is Hodan's bookkeeper. She also runs a hair salon at the camp. But she has bittersweet feelings about her new business career.
"I felt so happy to learn and gain knowledge, but at the same time I felt bad for not finishing school," says Mouslima, whose family fled Somalia in 2018, during her last year of high school.
She hopes to use her business profits to help educate her three younger siblings.
"Once all of them graduate, I swear it will be my turn to go and get a degree," she says.
Her training has taught her to be patient. "I learned that everything is gradual, step by step," Mouslima says, "and it is never too late to learn."
WFP's women's empowerment and livelihood initiatives in Ethiopia's Somali region have been funded by Spain's Catalan Agency for Development Cooperation (ACCD) since 2023.
