Trading under duress: when disaster strikes, it's usually up to women to rebuild the necessities of daily life. For many, setting up business in conflict zones is a trading reality. Women with international experience are reaching out with innovative business models to build new skills, seek new orders and create hope for women displaced by war.

• Author: Naidoo, Indira

According to the International Rescue Committee, there are currently 35 million people displaced in 24 countries. Millions have had to flee their homes and jobs due to disasters such as drought or coastal flooding. Hundreds of thousands of others have seen their homes bulldozed to make way for dams, airports, highways and other development projects, with little compensation. And the most urgent tasks of rebuilding daily life in a devastated region--such as feeding a family, doing the laundry, shopping for basic necessities and generating income--usually fall to women.

Poverty and severely limited means of generating income force many internally displaced women into abusive trades such as prostitution and trafficking. In IDP (internally displaced people) camps in Uganda, for example, many girls and women engage in "survival sex" to obtain food or "transactional sex" in exchange for spending money or small objects. These women are given no opportunities to further their education, engage in businesses or develop self-respect.

Effective aid, training and finance make a difference

"We hear much discussion about the front lines of war," says Rania Atalla, executive director for the United States of the Washington DC-based Women for Women International (WWI). "We need to focus more attention on the back-line delivery of peace." WWI works to help women recover from the ravages of war and become active citizens by offering them direct aid, job training and microcredit loans. Ms Atalla, a former communications director for King Abdullah in Jordan, says women are the cornerstones of new economies.

"Even during conflict, women hold the pieces together and avoid having their families and communities fall apart," she says. "Their resilience allows them to feed their children and send them to school. [It allows them] to venture out of their homes to ensure their family's survival. These very same skills are highly effective when applied in the effort to rebuild economies in post-conflict countries.

"The violence and hardship of conflict present the necessity and opportunity for women to become active citizens and step out of their perceived 'traditional' roles. We have seen this in Rwanda where genocide left the country with fewer men than women, and where approximately half of parliamentarians are female. Women can be critical players in rebuilding economies after conflict because they tend to invest their returns into their communities and seek...