From Displacement to Enterprise: How One Training Room in Bamenda Is Rewriting the Economics of Inclusion

By the TAGDev 2.0 Team
The University of Bamenda
Cameroon

Economic inclusion for refugees and displaced persons is often discussed in the abstract – as policy language, funding priorities, or long-term aspiration. In Bamenda, Cameroon, it looks like something more concrete: 77 women standing over workbenches, learning to formulate, package, and brand products they can sell.

The University of Bamenda, through its Transforming African Agricultural Universities to Meaningfully Contribute to Africa’s Growth and Development (TAGDev) 2.0 Programme, partnered with the Bamenda II Women’s Empowerment and Family Centre to deliver an entrepreneurship and skills development initiative built for exactly the populations development practitioners most often struggle to reach: internally displaced persons, refugees, women with disabilities, and other economically vulnerable women. The results offer a compact but powerful case study in what productive, market-facing inclusion can actually look like.

Skills Built for the Market, Not Just the Classroom

Of the 77 women trained, 12 were internally displaced persons or refugees and 6 were women living with disabilities. Rather than generic vocational instruction, the curriculum was deliberately market-oriented — training participants in the production of value-added goods including medicated soap, massage oil, Vaseline, bleach, skincare products, and groundnut sweet.

Critically, the programme didn’t stop at production. Participants were trained across the full value chain that determines whether a small enterprise survives: product formulation and quality assurance, branding and packaging, marketing strategy, and customer positioning. TAGDev 2.0 supported the effort end-to-end — mobilising and registering participants, and supplying the training materials needed for genuinely hands-on instruction rather than theoretical sessions.

Why This Model Speaks to Inclusion Practitioners

For those working on refugee and IDP inclusion, the persistent challenge is rarely willingness — it’s pathway. Displaced populations frequently arrive with skills, ambition, and labor capacity, but lack the specific, market-ready competencies and initial support needed to convert that potential into income. This programme was built to close precisely that gap.

By combining production skills with business management, branding, and marketing training, the initiative gave participants — including refugees and IDPs — the full toolkit needed to start or expand micro-enterprises, not just produce a single batch of goods. That distinction matters: a woman who can make soap has a skill; a woman who can make, package, brand, and sell soap has a business.

Measurable Movement Toward Self-Reliance

The programme’s own assessment is direct about what changed. Participating IDPs and refugees gained an important pathway toward self-reliance — employable, entrepreneurial skills capable of anchoring home and community-based enterprises. By strengthening business management and market readiness, the initiative works to reduce dependency on humanitarian assistance while opening routes to dignified work and wealth creation within both host and displaced communities.

The ripple effects extend further. Equipped with these skills, beneficiaries are positioned to launch businesses individually or in groups, employ others in their communities, diversify household income beyond a single vulnerable source, and contribute to local economic activity through the value-added products they now know how to bring to market.

A Template Worth Scaling

What makes this initiative instructive for development partners is its structure: a university convening a specialised community partner, targeting a clearly defined vulnerable population, and building a curriculum around real market demand rather than generic skills transfer. It is a small-scale intervention with a design built for replication — the kind of model that can be extended to other centers, other displaced communities, and other value chains without reinventing the underlying approach each time.

For anyone working to move refugees and displaced persons from the margins of humanitarian support toward the center of local economies, the Bamenda training offers a clear, evidence-backed answer to a familiar question: inclusion works when it is built around