By Peter Kidi
The policy focus on market access and livelihood opportunities is seen as central to resilience and “graduation from aid” by humanitarian and development agencies. Entrepreneurship training is celebrated as a way to transform refugees into self-reliant traders, equipped with the tools of sustainability. Yet there is a paradox: Training may make the baskets, but empty pockets mean those baskets return home unsold.
They came with baskets full of hope,
tomatoes shining like tiny suns,
flour packed tight in brown paper dreams.
Graduates of “Changing Lives,”
they carried their future to the market
as if salvation could be sold by the kilo.
But the stalls faced silence.
No hands reached out.
No coins clinked.
Only eyes lingered,
hungry but broke,
counting their longing instead of money.
What good is “market access”
when every pocket is empty,
when hunger is the only currency
that everyone owns?
A woman clutched her cabbage
like a child she could not give away.
A man weighed his beans
against the weight of his despair.
They stood in rows,
traders without trade,
merchants of nothing
but unsold hope.
They called it opportunity,
but it felt like another ration cut
a promise measured out,
leaving the stomach hollow.
The market without buyers
is not a market at all.
It is a mirror,
reflecting the truth:
you cannot sell bread
to those who have already
sold their hunger to survival.
And so they packed their baskets,
tomatoes bruised by silence,
flour dusting their hands like ash.
Dreams carried home again,
too heavy to eat,
too fragile to keep.
This poem was first published by the New Humanitarian