Donya* came to Germany in 2016. The trained midwife fled from with her 19-year-old son after her husband disappeared and she received death threats.
“On my first night in Germany, I slept better than I had in years. I will never forget that night,” she told DW.
While Donya appreciated the security offered by Germany, she continued to be tormented by sporadic fears for her own life and that of her son. Trauma is not quickly overcome and it makes concentrating difficult — a prerequisite for taking up a job.
Despite her traumatic experiences, Donya made it back into employment. She has been working as a care worker for the elderly for two years now after completing an eight-month training program — and German language courses. The 53-year-old says she feels her work is unchallenging, but she cannot cope with switching careers again.
The former midwife has also been helped by Work for Refugees, a project that is run by GIZ / Society for Intercultural Coexistence and other cooperation partners, and funded by the Berlin Senate (SenASGIVA). It is one of a number of publicly funded projects and nonprofit organizations that have been launched to address the diverse challenges facing and help dismantle recruitment obstacles.
Female refugees face threefold disadvantage
After eight years, some 68% of people who fled violence or conflict in their home countries to come to Germany found work, according to a rolling survey launched in 2016. But the representative study from the Institute for Employment Research (IAB), Germany’s Federal Office for Refugees (BAMF) and the Socioeconomic Panel (SOEP) also shows that female employment levels are much lower than that of men. Some two-thirds of women refugees remain unemployed after eight years. That is in contrast to 15% of adult male refugees.
“Studies show there is a threefold disadvantage for refugee women. They are disadvantaged as women, immigrants and refugees,” explained Maye Ehab, an IAB researcher.
Many men who flee to Germany are single, while many of the women come with young children. “That puts them at a disadvantage when it comes to attending German courses or taking up various services provided by the government,” Ehab told DW. A means space at day care centers is not easily available.
The difficulties in finding child care have also been an obstacle for many of the Ukrainian women who fled with their children to Germany after the .
While in 2015 and 2016, most of Germany’s 1.2 million asylum-seekers came from Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq and were disproportionately male, three-quarters of the seeking refuge are female.
Some female refugees never worked at all in their home countries or worked in sectors, like education or health, which require considerable language skills and are highly regulated in Germany, according to Ehab.
“Men can work in jobs that don’t require good German skills, such as the construction sector or the services sector. That makes it easier for them to jump this hurdle,” she added.
Language skills, recognition of qualifications throw up hurdles
The recognition of foreign qualifications is notoriously difficult in Germany. Donya had no paperwork to prove that she had spent 12 years in school and many years in medical training.
Vocational skills are often acquired in Germany as part of formalized, certified training programs. Many other countries rely solely on on-the-job learning. But experience alone does not count for much in Germany, if you don’t have the paper qualifications to match. That forces many refugees to start again from scratch.
While Donya is educated, the same does not apply to many other women from Afghanistan. Attacks on women’s education began long before the 2021 takeover by the Islamist . Donya’s husband, an English teacher, had been teaching girls and women in a rural village when he vanished.
Integration courses in Germany generally include 600 hours of German language tuition regardless of the recipients’ educational achievements. Afsaneh Afraze, who works for GIZ / Society for Intercultural Coexistence in Berlin, is critical of this one-size-fits-all all approach.
The trained psychologist — who, herself, fled to Germany in 2014 from Iran with her husband, a former political prisoner — can speak from personal experience. “I got 600 hours to learn German, but I had studied, I could speak English. In class, I was next to a 55-year-old who had never had a pen in her hand,” she said.
Afraze has been psychologically supporting Donya for several years, and said she is an exception rather than the rule. “It is not easy for a woman to go as far as she did in Afghanistan,” she told DW.
The Work for Refugees Project functions according to the motto of finding work first, according to the project’s job adviser and counselor, Inna Gissa. A Ukrainian refugee herself, she got her first job in Germany in a hotel restaurant. “I could only count to five and say: ‘My name is’ in German back then,” she said. Her command of English helped her get the position.
Gissa added that she knows from experience that the best and quickest way of learning the language and making contacts is by going to work.
Counseling, job fairs and mentoring can help
The Berlin-based project offers free one-to-one counseling sessions, CV workshops and helps to place people in suitable jobs. It refers clients to other organizations, which have special programs for women. Work for Refugees has also staged job fairs for example, in the mass refugee accommodation in Tegel.
, too. The NGO helps refugees find work through its network of 80 companies. The nonprofit enterprise focuses on mobilizing leading businesses to connect refugees to employment through hiring, training and mentorship. Some programs are specially tailored to the needs of women.
Mentoring is also on offer at ReDi School of Digital Integration, which was set up in 2015 and launched in Berlin in 2016. The school, which is now also based in several other locations, provides training in digital skills to tech-interested locals, migrants and refugees — and access to a network of tech leaders, students and alumni.
This mixture was ideal in helping to relaunch the career of 30-year-old Hala Younis, who arrived on a humanitarian visa from Syria in 2022. Three years in, the former teacher has a job as a customer relationship manager with the online fashion platform Zalando, thanks, in part, to her experiences at ReDi.
“It was like a community for all the people coming from abroad, refugees, people who have the same struggle. That is what brings more empathy and more support. You don’t feel alone in all this roller coaster,” Hala told DW.
Many grassroots projects or organizations are staffed by women who have fled to Germany, like Afsaneh Afraze and Inna Gissa. Their own experiences give them a better understanding of what the women are going through.
Women refugee volunteers, like Donya herself, also serve as role models. “Donya can stand on her own two feet and she is helping other women,” said Afraze. “I think that is very important that we are like a human chain.”
*Name changed to protect anonymity
Edited by: Rina Goldenberg
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