Refugee entrepreneurship: a practical guide to income that travels with you

Don't start from a business idea. Start from your own life. Write down every task you have done in the last five years that someone else paid you for — a client, an employer, a neighbour, a family member. Cleaning, cooking, translating, teaching, tutoring, sewing, bookkeeping, hair, nails, childcare, admin, design, writing, coding, coaching.

Circle the three you can do well without stress. Those are your candidates. A skill you have used before is a hundred times faster to sell than a skill you still need to learn.

“I do design” is hard to sell. “I make Instagram covers for yoga teachers” is easy. The narrower the customer, the easier the first sale — because the customer immediately recognises themselves in your words.

Pick one skill from step 1, and pair it with one specific customer. If you serve people back home or in the diaspora, that's an advantage: language, trust, and cultural context are things a local competitor cannot copy.

You do not need a business plan. You need one page that says: what you do, who it is for, how much it costs, and how to book you. That is enough to earn your first pound, euro, or dollar.

Use a free no-code site builder to publish that page in an afternoon. One clear headline, three lines of description, a price, a button. You can rewrite it every week as you learn.

You are one person. AI and no-code let you act like five. Use an AI assistant to draft emails and social posts in the language of your customers. Use a no-code form to take bookings. Use a scheduling tool to protect your time. Use a spreadsheet — not custom software — to track money.

Learn one tool per week, not ten at once. The goal is not to master AI. The goal is to remove one manual task every seven days.

SettleX programs teach exactly these tools, free for displaced people.

This is the part that stops most displaced founders — and it is solvable. You will usually need: an email address, a phone number that works in your current country, one form of ID, and a bank or e-wallet that accepts international payments. Ask other people from your community which services worked for their status; the right answer changes by country and by month.

Start with one payment method and one currency. Add more only when a customer asks.

Your first ten customers will not come from strangers on the internet. They will come from people who already know your name — friends, former colleagues, community groups, diaspora networks, parents at your child's school, people from your place of worship.

Send a short, honest message: “I'm starting to offer X for Y. If you know one person who needs this, please share my page.” Ten messages a day for two weeks is usually enough to book the first customer. Deliver excellent work. Ask for a testimonial. Repeat.

Rules on the right to work, self-employment, and tax vary widely for refugees, asylum-seekers, and people on humanitarian visas. Before you take your first payment, check the rules for your specific status in your host country. A free legal clinic, a refugee support charity, or a local Citizens Advice office is usually the safest place to ask.

This guide is educational, not legal advice. Getting one hour of proper advice at the start saves months of stress later.