WHEN Cecelia Anei’s home collapsed around her in 2023, swept away by the violence that tore through this Upper Nile capital, she joined millions who had lost everything to conflict. At 28, with her family scattered and her future uncertain, she had every reason to surrender to despair.
Instead, eighteen months later, she stands smiling behind a thriving vegetable stand, employing two workers and rebuilding the home that war destroyed.
Her transformation speaks to a quiet revolution unfolding across South Sudan, where youth-led enterprises are emerging not merely as businesses, but as instruments of survival, dignity, and an almost defiant hope in a nation synonymous with suffering.
In a country where 72% of the population is under 30 and conflict has rendered “normal life” nearly meaningless, the Youth Enterprise Development and Capacity Building project is wagering on an unconventional premise: that commerce can heal what violence has broken, that market opportunities can restore what war has stolen.
The numbers tell one story—$110 million disbursed, 1,247 youth and women-led enterprises funded, interest-free loans ranging from $27,000 to $38,500. But the human arithmetic reveals something more profound.
Building Markets, Rebuilding Lives
Anei received her $27,000 loan later in 2023, months after fleeing Malakal. She returned to a Protection of Civilian site—those grim way stations between displacement and home—and revived her vegetable business. She has repaid 38% of the loan. More significantly, she has accumulated enough savings to begin reconstructing her family’s home, brick by brick, a physical manifestation of futures being rebuilt.
“This project has supported many displaced women,” she says. “It has restored our confidence, enabling us to return home and rebuild our lives.”
That word—confidence—appears repeatedly in conversations with beneficiaries. In contexts of total loss, economic agency becomes psychological reconstruction.
The Hagana Agro-processing Company tells a parallel story of transformation. Before their interest-free loan, they sold raw honey, sesame, and peanuts—commodities extracted and exported, value created elsewhere. Now they process these products to international standards, creating finished goods sold globally.
“Before, we only sold the raw products,” explains Godwin Juma, the company’s Sales and Marketing Officer. “Now we’re part of value chains and are shaping new markets.”
CEO Matata Safi notes the company has grown from raw agriculture sales to distributing processed goods to grocery chains—a leap from subsistence to sophistication, from survival to competition.
From Snacks to Supply Chains
Perhaps most striking is the Betty Events Women’s Group Village Savings and Credit Cooperative Society. In 2019, 40 women entrepreneurs started selling a few snacks in Juba. Their $38,500 loan, combined with training in processing, packaging, branding, and financial management, has transformed them into a 23-employee operation selling honey, shea butter, natural oils, and okra powder locally, regionally, and internationally.
“We have been able to improve our packaging and labelling and have increased sales to now be able to comfortably pay school fees and healthcare for our children and families,” says Betty Poni, the cooperative’s chairlady. The specificity matters: school fees, healthcare, basic needs—the ordinary aspirations that become extraordinary in contexts of perpetual crisis.
Commerce as Peacebuilding
What makes these stories particularly poignant is their context. South Sudan, the world’s youngest nation, has known little but conflict since its 2011 independence. The 2023 fighting that displaced Anei was merely the latest chapter in cycles of violence that have made millions of refugees in their own country.
Yet here, economic opportunity is functioning as an alternative to armed struggle. Young people who might otherwise be recruited into militias are instead processing sesame seeds and packaging honey. Women who lost everything are employing others who lost everything.
“The YEDCB project is creating pathways to opportunity,” says Mohamed Abchir, UNDP’s South Sudan Resident Representative, describing how the initiative strengthens institutions, fosters private-sector engagement, and connects youth-owned enterprises with buyers and supply chains.
Monica Agum Daniel Awet Akot, Undersecretary of Youth and Sports, frames the African Development Bank partnership as reflecting commitment to policies that foster innovation and entrepreneurship—the language of development, certainly, but in South Sudan, the language of survival.
Fragile Hope
None of this suggests that South Sudan’s trajectory has fundamentally changed, or that enterprise development can substitute for political stability, functional governance, or peace agreements that hold. The conflict that destroyed Anei’s home could easily destroy her vegetable stand. The market access that transformed Hagana could evaporate with renewed violence.
But in a nation where hopelessness has become rational, where expecting the worst is simply realism, these 1,247 enterprises represent something more subversive than economic development. They represent the possibility that futures can be built even when everything suggests otherwise, that young people can create rather than destroy, that women can lead rather than flee.
As the African Development Bank plans to scale up assistance in 2026, the question is not whether these initiatives can end South Sudan’s conflicts. They cannot. The question is whether they can create enough islands of normalcy, enough spaces where ordinary aspirations become possible, that they begin to change the calculus of what South Sudanese youth believe they can achieve.
Cecelia Anei, rebuilding her home one vegetable sale at a time, has already answered that question for herself.
