From aid to agency: Why investing in refugee farmers makes climate and economic sense

Yet displaced populations remain framed primarily through the language of need — people to feed, shelter, and protect — rather than capability. Rarely are they recognised as farmers, workers, entrepreneurs, and consumers participating in local economies. This framing error has consequences.

When people are seen only as beneficiaries, responses default to relief instead of integration, and capital flows toward short-term assistance rather than long-term productivity.

But displacement does not erase economic agency. Across Africa, displaced people cultivate land, run businesses, and trade goods—often under extraordinary constraints. The real barrier is not capacity, but access—to finance, to markets, and to tools that enable adaptation in a climate-stressed world.

This shifts the central question. The issue is no longer whether displaced populations should be included in economic systems, but how quickly investors and policymakers can remove the structural barriers preventing that inclusion.

In 2022, Acumen launched its Forcibly Displaced Population Investment Initiative with a contrarian premise: displaced communities are not peripheral to markets — they are part of them. Investing in enterprises that integrate refugees and host populations can generate both commercial returns and resilience outcomes.

Early evidence challenges conventional assumptions.

First, entrepreneurs embedded within displaced communities are a powerful leverage point. Many operate viable businesses yet remain chronically capital-constrained. When financed appropriately, these enterprises generate multiplier effects — stabilising incomes, improving productivity, and accelerating the adoption of climate-smart practices.

Second, inclusion works best within value chains, not at their margins. Competitive advantage in agriculture lies in strengthening linkages between production and markets.

Refugee farmers are already participating in these systems; improving their productivity and market access is not a social add-on, but value chain optimisation.

Third, conventional financing models are poorly suited to displacement contexts. Climate volatility and regulatory uncertainty demand flexibility. Adaptive instruments and blended structures are not charity; they are risk-appropriate, designed tools.

Recent evidence from Convergence’s Humanitarian Blended Finance analysis reinforces this point. Despite more than 1,500 blended finance transactions globally, only a small fraction have been explicitly structured around humanitarian outcomes, highlighting how early and underdeveloped this market remains.

Yet the deals that do exist reveal a consistent pattern: they disproportionately serve low-income and vulnerable populations, with the majority targeting bottom-of-the-pyramid communities.

The challenge is not whether impact is achievable, but how capital is structured and deployed.

Most humanitarian blended finance transactions remain small, often below $25 million, reflecting fragmented pipelines, elevated transaction costs, and persistent risk mispricing in fragile settings.

Importantly, concessional debt and equity dominate these transactions, underscoring the critical role of catalytic capital in enabling investment where purely commercial financing struggles to operate. What this signals is not a failure of markets, but a design gap.

Emerging structures—including layered funds, guarantee mechanisms, and technical assistance facilities—demonstrate that private capital can participate effectively in displacement-affected contexts when risks are shared intelligently and grounded in local realities.

These lessons point to a broader reality: investing in displaced populations is not only a moral argument — it is an economic one.
As climate shocks intensify and displacement rises, aid systems alone cannot sustain livelihoods at scale.

Without investment-led pathways to income generation, fiscal pressures on host states deepen while human potential remains underutilised.

Displacement is not a temporary anomaly; it is a structural feature of the modern world. Refugee farmers do not need perpetual accommodation at the margins of economies — they need meaningful access to the systems that drive growth, resilience, and opportunity.

The sooner capital markets recognise this reality, the sooner resilience, productivity, and dignity will no longer be treated as competing objectives, but as mutually reinforcing outcomes.

Maranga is the Africa Director at Acumen and Ng’ang’a is the Associate Director of Investing at Acumen – East Africa