Every Tuesday morning, Luisa Alberto walks to the edge of the displacement shelter that is now her home, carrying a small cloth pouch containing 50 Mozambican meticais.
It’s not much – less than US $0.80 – but when she joins her circle of twelve other women, their pooled savings create something powerful: opportunity.
"The idea is to build a corpus with which members can buy what they need – from sewing machines to seeds," the 34-year-old mother of three tells TRT Afrika, cradling her youngest child as other women gather around. "It keeps our hopes alive."
The system of revolving credit within the savings group is just one instance of how women in Mozambique cope with the devastating treble of internal conflict, climate disasters and economic collapse.
Refusing to be defined by their circumstances, they are creating solutions that show how communities can recover from humanitarian disasters without having to rely entirely on external aid.
Rising from despair
When Cyclone Jude tore through Luisa's makeshift shelter this March, she lost everything she had – and not for the first time.
Just months earlier, she had fled her home in Cabo Delgado after armed militants raided her village, joining thousands of others trekking south in search of safe sanctuaries.
"We ran from the war, then the storm took whatever little we had left," she tells TRT Afrika. "I didn’t know then how much longer we could survive like this."
Her journey reflects a broader crisis affecting 1.3 million people already uprooted by violence and extreme weather, with over 25,000 people being displaced in recent weeks alone.
Women have borne the brunt of this convergence of crises, facing heightened risks of violence, loss of livelihoods and significant barriers to accessing protection and healthcare services.
But hope often springs from the unlikeliest of places.
Across Mozambique's displacement camps, teeming with affected communities, grassroots networks are flourishing.
In Nampula Province, women's groups have established community farms on the outskirts of refugee settlements that yielded enough food during the last harvest to feed 200 families.
These agricultural cooperatives not only address food insecurity but also create sustainable livelihoods and restore dignity to families who lost everything.
Beyond livelihoods
Grassroots activists have created networks of safe houses for survivors of gender-based violence, funded through microloans and staffed by trained volunteers.
These community-led sanctuaries offer both immediate protection and long-term support systems that formal aid structures often struggle to provide.
Remarkably, healing itself has become a community enterprise. In safe spaces supported by the refugee agency UNHCR, peer support networks are helping traumatised survivors rediscover their voices.
"Some of these women are so traumatised that they don't speak at all in the beginning," says Ancila Niyubuntu, a Pemba-based psychologist. "Slowly, when they see they are not alone, they begin to share. The moment of connection – it's powerful. That's when healing begins."
Crisis to leadership
Cabo Delgado, a resource-rich province with vast gas reserves, has been the epicentre of Mozambique's insurgency since 2017, with conflict now spreading to previously peaceful areas like Niassa Province, which recorded 2,000 new displacements in weeks.
"Men are killed or join armed groups; women become the only caretakers left," Teresa João, a nurse at a displacement camp in Pemba, tells TRT Afrika. "They arrive malnourished, pregnant or with children who feel sick from drinking dirty water. And when cyclones hit, they lose even the little they had."
As João notes, the hope that keeps them going isn't passive. It's productive. Women who survived hostage situations, sexual violence and repeated displacement are channelling their experiences into advocacy and mutual support systems that strengthen entire communities.
Since March, Ancuabe and Montepuez districts have recorded over 20,000 new displacements, pushing already strained camps and host communities to their limits. Repeated attacks force families to relocate multiple times, yet each move seems to deepen rather than weaken community bonds.
Solutions at scale
While humanitarian funding faces a severe shortfall – with barely 32% of UNHCR's $42 million appeal being met so far – community-led innovations offer hope for sustainable recovery models that don't depend solely on external aid.
"We are being pushed to the limit," says a UNHCR official who spoke on condition of anonymity. "With funding shortages, we may have to cut healthcare and education for refugees."
Grassroots solutions emerging from affected communities offer alternative pathways. The women's savings circles, agricultural cooperatives and peer support networks create systems that are resilient and can function even when formal aid structures face constraints.
With adequate support and recognition, Mozambique's women-led innovations could even reshape how the world responds to humanitarian crises.
As Luisa counts her weekly contribution to the savings circle, she's not just pooling money; she's investing in a future where communities don't just recover from crisis, but emerge stronger than ever before.
