By Our Reporter
Amahoro Coalition has released Hiding in Plain Sight, Africa’s $27B Displacement Market Opportunity, a research report documenting the economic scale of displacement across Africa and the commercial case for private sector investment in displacement-affected communities.
The report’s central finding is striking: Africa’s displaced population of 43.1 million people, refugees and internally displaced persons combined, generates an estimated $27 billion in annual income. That is an economy the size of Uganda’s GDP in the 2010s, and Zambia’s today. Yet it operates almost entirely without the financial infrastructure that any comparably sized economy would take for granted: no banking sector, no formal retail chains, no structured access to credit.
“Africa’s displaced communities are not waiting for rescue. They are running businesses, farming land, and moving goods across borders, with almost none of the financial infrastructure available to everyone else. That gap is where the opportunity is,” says Tito Mbathi, Head of Partnerships, Amahoro Coalition.
The report maps investment potential across five sectors: entrepreneurship, agriculture, finance, supply chain, and manufacturing with primary data, market sizing, and case studies drawn from working models already generating commercial returns.
In partnership with dfcu Bank, one of Uganda’s leading financial institutions, Amahoro Coalition is working to translate the report’s findings into concrete financial products and pathways for displaced entrepreneurs across Uganda’s settlement corridors. dfcu Bank’s 57-branch network and established agribusiness and SME portfolio make it uniquely positioned to reach the displacement economy this report documents.
“At dfcu, we believe financial inclusion must extend to every enterprising community with the ambition and ability to build sustainable livelihoods. This report reinforces what we see across Uganda: displaced people are not only participants in the economy, they are entrepreneurs, farmers, customers, and partners in growth. Through our work with Amahoro Coalition, we are committed to supporting practical financial solutions that unlock access to credit, markets, and enterprise development for refugees and host communities alike,” Maryann Wanjiku Michuki, Chief Business Solutions & Marketing Officer
Uganda: The Clearest Proof Point in Africa
Uganda hosts more refugees than any other country in Africa, over 1.7 million people, and its land-based self-reliance model has become the continent’s most cited example of what is possible when policy creates the conditions for economic participation.
In Uganda, 91% of refugees live in settlements where they are allocated farm plots, supporting agricultural livelihoods. In 2023 alone, more than 86,000 refugees received training in agriculture, strengthening food production and self-reliance.
Since 2017, over $200 million has been invested in refugee-hosting districts, benefiting both displaced populations and host communities. Additionally, the Omia Agribusiness Farmer Hub model has reached over 49,000 farmers and channeled more than $413,000 directly to refugee and host farmers, while operating commercially in corridors that were previously considered too high-risk.
Uganda demonstrates that the constraint on displaced people’s economic participation is not capacity or willingness, it is access. Where land, credit, and market linkages have been unlocked, commercial viability has followed.
The Scale of the Invisible Nation
Kyangwali settlement is home to 83,558 refugees, more people than Uganda’s internationally known city of Entebbe. Yet Kyangwali is rarely recognised as an economy in national statistics or investment strategies. Most of Africa’s displaced live, economically speaking, off the grid.
This invisibility is the product of documentation requirements, regulatory frameworks, and financial systems designed for settled populations, systems that exclude displaced people not because of any economic failure on their part, but because the systems were never designed to include them. The report argues that these design failures are, for first-mover investors, the opportunity.