World Refugee Day
As development and humanitarian budgets tighten, it’s time to advance how we support displacement-affected communities in Sub-Saharan Africa. At OCA, we’re focused on strengthening local ecosystems and creating real livelihoods that foster inclusive and integrated market-led economies. Our work focuses on three interconnected levers: building sustainable interventions that continue to deliver impact beyond project lifecycles, strengthening Refugee-Led and local organizations to anchor solutions in community expertise, and unlocking market systems that create real economic opportunities. Together, these approaches move refugee and host communities towards more thriving and inclusive local economies.
Shifting Refugee Support in Sub-Saharan Africa: From Dependency to Sustainable, Locally-Led Solutions
Nowhere is this tension more evident than in Sub-Saharan Africa, which hosts nearly 35% of the world’s refugees, often in countries themselves facing economic and climate stresses.2 As donors, non-government organisations (NGOs), and financiers grapple with how to do more with less, we at OCA – alongside our partners – have been pushing towards a renewed ecosystem approach: we must shift from short-term, project-based aid towards sustainable, locally anchored, market-driven solutions.
For too long, the prevailing model has treated refugee support as an exercise in perpetual relief. This needs to change. If we want real impact, as key stakeholders, we must all get more strategic on three core principles: sustainability, localisation, and market systems approaches.
1. Sustainability: A Spectrum of Approaches for Fragile Contexts
At OCA, we see sustainability not as a one-size-fits-all target but as a spectrum that must be tailored to local context and market opportunity.
In fragile and conflict-affected areas, we recognise that the “public” definition of sustainability is more relevant and there will continue to be a need for a certain level of government or donor-funded support.
Figure 1: Unpacking sustainability potential requires varied approaches depending on local context to achieve long-term impact
However, across our various initiatives in fragile contexts and vulnerable communities, from education to food security and financial inclusion efforts, our goal is not to leave communities permanently reliant on aid. We aim to help them move along the sustainability spectrum, progressively introducing market-based approaches and private-sector models that can deliver improved livelihoods. Our minimum benchmark is clear: any intervention should achieve some form of impact continuity beyond its own conclusion. By leveraging local ecosystems and creating market-driven opportunities and strategically increasing financial inclusion, we can reduce long-term dependency and help communities build resilience to future shocks.
2. Strengthening Local Ecosystems: Supporting RLOs and Local NGOs
Achieving this vision demands that we strengthen the entire ecosystem of local actors supporting refugees. RLOs, local NGOs, and other local actors are closest to the challenges and opportunities on the ground. They bring critical contextual knowledge and social capital. But too often, they are left scrambling for fragmented, short-term funding, with little room to build organisational capacity.
Instead, we should be investing in these local actors so that they can become more robust and sustainable by planning for the long term, innovating, and diversifying their funding sources.
This shift will enable us to tap into the local knowledge needed to design interventions grounded in reality, and to build trust with communities. It will also make aid flows more efficient and reduce overheads by cutting out unnecessary layers. At Open Capital, we are working directly with RLOs through targeted capacity building to strengthen their role as trusted, effective market linkage actors. We see immense, often overlooked, potential in RLOs to drive inclusive economic growth in displacement settings, and we’re committed to helping them lead.
However, these local organisations cannot operate in isolation. A resilient support network spans from RLOs to government agencies and sectoral actors such as teacher training colleges, local health facilities, and private-sector partners. Strengthening these linkages is critical to delivering integrated, high-quality services and avoiding duplication.
3. Market Systems Approaches: Creating Viable Demand for Skills
Critically, sustainability cannot be achieved by skilling refugees and host communities alone. There is little value in training a generation of youth in hair braiding, tailoring, or agronomy if we are not strategically supporting the development of a holistic ecosystem to serve as a more reliable market to absorb those skills.
We must therefore adopt a market systems approach that creates both supply and demand. Through our work in the sector, we are piloting market-driven collaborations with private sector players to provide commercial off-take to offer more predictable incomes to refugees and hosts. For example, we have seen that in some refugee hosting areas, there is significantly underutilized fertile land. We see deep opportunity to leverage our market expertise and work with private-sector partners to unlock this potential by co-investing in inputs, training, and market linkage infrastructure, to secure securing offtake commitments.
This approach uses donor capital as catalytic funding, de-risking private-sector engagement while ensuring that refugees are not left in permanent dependency. Once reliable income streams are established, other skills training, like services or retail, becomes more meaningful, as there is improved local purchasing power to support these microenterprises.
Ultimately, our goal must be to foster inclusive and integrated local economies in which refugees and host communities are both contributors and beneficiaries. In a year when donor budgets are under immense pressure, we cannot afford business as usual. We must seize this opportunity to rethink, relearn, and redo how we work – recognising that moving towards sustainability, empowering local actors, and building market systems are not standalone goals, but deeply interconnected levers. Together, they offer the pathway to shift refugee populations from aid-dependency to thriving, resilient communities.
At Open Capital, we welcome collaboration and fresh action-oriented approaches. If you are working on similar challenges or would like to learn more and deepen these possibilities together, we would love to connect.
Reza Fazel – rfazel@opencapital.com
Katie Brauer – kbrauer@opencapital.com
