Meet Christine Misenga
The first time you meet, Christine Misenga you would not assume the world has tried to beat her down. She sits upright, her smile is big and beautiful and speaks in measured sentences, choosing her words the way a seamstress selects thread: deliberately, with purpose. But behind the composure is a story that is, at once, a tale of loss and of extraordinary resilience.
Like teenagers everywhere, Christine – born in 2005 in the Democratic Republic of Congo – grew up with big dreams, chief among them a future defined by education at the highest level. But war had other plans. Her once peaceful village became a battleground, and with it came displacement – and the slow, painful realization that the life she knew was gone. Together with her mother and four siblings, Christine found herself in Kakuma refugee camp, carrying a new, unwanted identity: refugee.
Today, at Peace House Innovations in Kalobeyei Settlement, Turkana County, Kenya, Christine Misenga earns a living doing the very thing she once only dared to dream of. She is a tailor. She is a fashion designer. She is, slowly and surely, becoming an entrepreneur. And she is – above all – proof that with the right opportunity, displaced young people can not only survive, they can flourish.
A Journey Interrupted: Leaving the Congo
The Democratic Republic of Congo has, for decades, been one of the world’s most protracted humanitarian crises. Decades of armed conflict, ethnic tension, and political instability have displaced millions of its citizens, many of them young people who, in any other circumstances, would be sitting in classrooms, apprenticing in workshops, or building the businesses that sustain local economies.
Christine was one of them. She had completed her secondary school education, in the DRC before circumstances beyond her control forced her family to flee. The journey to Kenya, like all refugee journeys, was defined not by a single dramatic moment but by a long, grinding accumulation of uncertainty: about safety, about shelter, about what the next day would hold.
Upon arriving in Kenya, Christine and her family were directed to Kalobeyei Settlement in Turkana County, one of the newer refugee settlements in Kenya, established in 2016 to help decongest the nearby Kakuma Refugee Camp. Kalobeyei was conceived with an ambitious vision: not simply a place to house displaced people, but a self-reliant settlement where refugees and host community members could live, trade, and build livelihoods side by side.
That vision – still very much a work in progress – would eventually become the context in which Christine’s own story would take a turn toward hope. But that moment had not yet arrived.
Starting Over: Back to the Beginning
For Christine, arrival in Kenya meant not just the loss of home and community, it meant starting her education over from scratch. Upon settling in Kalobeyei, she enrolled in primary school.
Let that sink in for a moment. A young woman who had already completed secondary school in her home country, sitting again in a primary school classroom, surrounded by much younger children, learning a curriculum in a new language, in a new country, under the weight of displacement. It would have been entirely understandable, perhaps even expected, for Christine to have given up. “I had to do this, I had always wanted to go to school, and since one opportunity had been taken away, I took the one presented to me even if I had to start over again,” she says. Her desire to be in the fashion industry fuelled the fire, and she pushed until she cleared her primary school and did the major exams.
Christine completed her studies and – having known what she wanted to do from the beginning – she started looking for opportunities. When she heard that DanChurchAid was offering an apprenticeship program in tailoring and fashion design, she applied immediately. She already knew, she says, that this was the path she wanted. The program simply opened the door.
The Apprenticeship: Where Dreams Meet Discipline
The DCA Kenya Apprenticeship Program was designed with a clear-eyed understanding of what young refugees in settlements like Kalobeyei actually need; a structured pathway into a real skill, with real mentors, in a real business environment.
The program placed Christine with Peace House Innovations, a refugee-operated tailoring and fashion design business that had itself benefited from an Innovative Grant under DCA’s Business Development Support (BDS) program. The symmetry is significant: a business that had been lifted by DCA support was now, in turn, lifting the next generation of young talent from within the same community.
Six Months of Transformation
For six months, Christine reported to Peace House Innovations every day. She learned the anatomy of a sewing machine, how to thread it, how to maintain it, how to coax it into producing the precise stitch a garment demands. She learned to read and interpret patterns, to take measurements, to cut fabric with the confidence that comes only from repeated practice. She learned the vocabulary of fashion design: silhouette, drape, seam allowance, and finishing.
But the apprenticeship was about more than technical skills. It was about professional formation, learning how to work within a business, how to manage time, how to interact with customers, and how to understand the economics of a small enterprise. Christine was not simply learning how to sew. She was learning how to think like a business owner.
Graduation: A Milestone in a Life of Milestones
At the end of six months, Christine graduated from the DCA Apprenticeship Program. For any participant, graduation is a moment of pride. For Christine, it was something more; it was the culmination of a journey that had begun with displacement and passed through a classroom full of younger children and arrived, finally, at a moment of genuine professional achievement.
She had earned it. Every stitch.
Employment: From Trainee to Breadwinner
Graduation from the program might, in other contexts, have been the end of the story, a certification earned, a program completed, a young woman returned to the unemployment that characterises life in so many refugee settlements. But Christine’s story did not end at graduation. It accelerated.
Peace House Innovations, impressed by her performance and aware of the genuine value she brought to their operation, offered Christine a job. She accepted.
Today, Christine earns an average monthly income of KES 7,000, a modest sum by most measures, but a transformative one in the context of Kalobeyei Settlement, where livelihoods are scarce, and humanitarian funding has been sharply curtailed in recent years.
Supporting a Family of Six
Christine is not spending that income on herself alone. She is the primary support for her mother and four siblings. Five people, in addition to herself, look to Christine’s monthly earnings as a critical contribution to their household wellbeing.
School fees. Food. Medical needs. Clothing. The hundred small costs of daily life that, without income, become insurmountable. With Christine’s earnings, earned through skill, through discipline, through the practical knowledge she acquired during her apprenticeship, those needs are being met. “I am able to support my family now. My mother. My siblings. When I earn, I feel like I am doing something real, something that matters,” she says
Looking Forward: The Shop She Will Own
Ask Christine where she sees herself in five years, and her answer is immediate and unhesitating: running her own shop.
She has thought about this carefully. She knows she will need capital to rent a space, to purchase materials, and to invest in equipment. She knows she will need to build a customer base, to market her services, and to manage the financial rhythms of a small business. She knows, because the apprenticeship taught her this; that being a good tailor is necessary but not sufficient. You also have to be a capable entrepreneur.
The Apprenticeship Model: Dignified Development
What makes the apprenticeship model particularly powerful is its insistence on dignity. Christine was empowered. She was a trainee, a professional in formation. She worked. She learned. She earned. The program treated her, from the beginning, as someone with capability and potential, not merely as someone with need.
That distinction matters enormously, both practically and psychologically. For Christine, it meant that Kakuma was not the end of her story. It was simply where the next chapter began.
About the project
Title: HumFrame 2026
Donor: Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Denmark
