When survival becomes work: the untold economic role of displaced women in Africa

Op-Ed written by Julien Ngum Che

In many displacement-affected communities across Cameroon, women wake before sunrise, not because opportunity awaits them, but because survival demands it. They farm exhausted soil, sell small goods at roadside corners, fetch water, prepare food, care for children, nurse their own trauma, and somehow still hold families together. Most of this labour never appears in any economic report. As a researcher who has spent years working alongside internally displaced women in Cameroon, I have watched survival itself become a form of work – relentless, unrecognized, and unpaid.

Women across Africa already carry a disproportionate share of unpaid care work and informal labour. But for internally displaced women in crisis-affected communities, this burden does not simply increase, it transforms. Conflict, climate change, food insecurity, and economic collapse do not only disrupt livelihoods. They restructure the entire shape of a woman’s day, her choices, and her body.

In Cameroon’s North-West and South-West Regions, thousands of women have been forced to abandon their land, homes, businesses, and the social networks that once provided both income and safety. In their new settlements, they cobble together livelihoods through small-scale farming, petty trading, domestic work, food selling, and casual labour. None of this looks impressive on paper. All of it is the reason their families are still alive.

Yet displaced women remain largely absent from conversations about economic growth, entrepreneurship, and development planning, both in Cameroon and across the continent. Their work is categorized as survival rather than economic productivity. Because so much of it happens in households and informal spaces, it is rarely measured, rarely protected, and almost never supported by policy.

This invisibility carries a compounding cost. Women keeping their families alive through informal work have no land tenure, no formal credit access, no social protection, and no seat in the policy forums that shape the resources available to them. Many cannot access microfinance for lack of collateral. Others are excluded from climate adaptation and economic recovery programmes despite being among the people who need them most, and who would use them most effectively.

Climate change is sharpening these inequalities. Along Cameroon’s coastal zones, erratic rainfall, flooding, and deteriorating soil fertility are hollowing out agricultural productivity. Displaced women feel these pressures first, through longer unpaid working hours, through the emotional weight of managing scarcity, through the ingenuity required to stretch a depleted harvest into enough meals for a hungry household. When crops fail or food prices rise, it is women who quietly reroute the family’s survival, absorbing an anxiety that nobody else holds.

When the conversation turns to Africa’s economic future, the language shifts quickly to innovation, entrepreneurship, and digital transformation. These conversations matter. But they tend to describe an economy that does not yet exist for many women, while ignoring the one that women are already running – informal, crisis-adapted, and largely unacknowledged. You cannot build an inclusive African economy on the condition that you only count the labour you can already see.

Recognizing the work that displaced women do is not generosity. It is a correction – a basic matter of economic justice. African development strategies must move beyond symbolic inclusion and direct real resources toward women holding communities together under extraordinary pressure. That means expanding financial access in the informal sector, building social protection systems that reach displaced populations, ensuring climate investments are accountable to the women most exposed to climate harm, counting unpaid care work in national accounts, and creating policy processes that displaced women can genuinely participate in, not merely be consulted about.

Displaced women are not simply victims of conflict and climate change. They are economic actors, caregivers, food producers, informal entrepreneurs, and architects of community resilience. Long before any institution arrives, many have already built the systems keeping their families alive. That deserves to be called what it is: productive, essential, economic work.

Africa’s future economy will not be built on growth figures alone. It will succeed or fail on whether we finally choose to see, count, and support the labour that has quietly sustained societies through crisis for generations. The women doing that work have been waiting long enough.

Biography 

Julien Ngum Che is the founder & CEO of the Organization for the Empowerment of the Marginalized (ORGEM).