Do migrant women have access to housing, healthcare or employment support services on equal terms with men? Or do they remain on the margins, invisible to institutions, underrepresented in decision-making, and underserved by the policies supposedly made to help them?
If the answer leans towards the latter, your city may be overlooking the barriers migrant women face, and designing services that don’t work for them.
Migrant women are not a homogeneous group. They bring with them a rich diversity of backgrounds, skills and experiences. But they are also confronted with overlapping challenges: legal insecurity, lack of childcare, low-paid jobs despite higher qualifications, restricted political rights, language barriers, and violence (both structural and physical.)
“Most migrant women face intersecting barriers through their integration process,” explains Alyssa Ahrabare, Capacity Building Coordinator of the European Network of Migrant Women. These hurdles often go unaddressed in mainstream integration strategies, even though they fundamentally shape women’s access to essential services.
“Cities should harness their skills,” said Eleonore Kofman, Professor of Gender, Migration and Leadership at Middlesex University London, “because they have many.” Yet, as Kofman noted, cities still have a lot to learn when it comes to tailoring their strategies to migrant women’s real lives and needs.
Building trust through the people they trust
Migrant women’s reluctance to engage with public services is frequently a matter of trust. Without relationships built on safety, empathy and cultural understanding, institutions may seem difficult to reach, or even threatening.
Most migrant women face intersecting barriers through their integration process.
Two European cities, Vienna and Berlin, are demonstrating how building trust can start with the simplest idea: empowering migrant women to support each other.
In Vienna, the Nachbarinnen programme has trained hundreds of migrant women to become mentors within their own communities. Throughout a five-month training, these women develop the skills to provide guidance on education, healthcare, parenting, and access to services, all in the native languages and cultural contexts of the people they help.
In Berlin, Project Possible has focused on empowering refugee and migrant women through peer-led coaching, labour market orientation and community building. But it also faced a more modern challenge: misinformation. In response, the team deployed what they call “digital street work” reaching migrant women through trusted Telegram channels. Ukrainian women who had already participated in the programme were hired or volunteered as “ambassadors” to explain how Germany’s job support systems work, debunk rumours, and share their own success stories.
Empowerment: from recipients to leaders
“We increased the self-confidence of the participants, as they had a better overview of the job market,” explained Begoña de la Marta, from Project Possible, highlighting the benefits of the applied actions.
The two initiatives highlight a crucial lesson: trust is a precondition for access. Without it, the best-designed services may remain unused.
Beyond trust-building, both the Vienna and Berlin examples demonstrate a second powerful thread: empowerment.
By putting migrant women in active roles (as mentors, trainers, or peer connectors) cities are shifting the paradigm. Instead of treating them as passive beneficiaries of help, they become key actors in integration systems. This not only increases the reach and relevance of public programmes, but also fosters confidence, independence, and community leadership among women who may otherwise remain excluded.
If it’s not co-designed, it won’t work
However, trust and empowerment are not enough if the policies behind them are designed in isolation. Cities cannot create effective services for migrant women without migrant women in the room.
“This topic should be constantly advocated for, as women’s issues are often overlooked,” said Deborah Carlos Valencia, co-founder of Melissa Network, a grassroots organisation working with migrant and refugee women in Athens.
Her organisation works closely with the municipality at three levels: policy representation, coordination with civil society, and direct service provision. From running counselling centres for survivors of violence to co-managing migrant integration centres, Melissa Network demonstrates how migrant-led groups can become powerful engines of local change, but only if cities open the door to real collaboration.
At a structural level, co-design must be intentional. It means mapping out existing services, identifying gaps, and consulting directly with women affected by exclusion. Co-design isn’t just a buzzword; it’s a foundational practice. If cities fail to include migrant women in decision-making, they risk reinforcing the very inequalities they aim to dismantle.
A roadmap for action
This topic should be constantly advocated for, as women’s issues are often overlooked.
So what can cities do to move from good intentions to lasting change? Ceri Hutton, Director of MigrationWork, explained some key points that were gathered by the EU-funded CONNECTION project.
The project has developed a how-to guide for cities building a gender dimension into integration policies and practices that can be regarded as essential steps to developing effective, women-centred integration strategies.
To build effective, women-centred integration strategies, cities need more than good intentions: they need structure. This begins with securing political commitment, ensuring that gender and migration are treated as core components of local development rather than isolated projects. Dedicated resources must follow, even for small-scale initiatives, alongside clear leadership and coordination.
Cities should also map existing services to avoid duplication and connect fragmented efforts, while building strong partnerships with NGOs and migrant-led organisations. The collection of disaggregated data is crucial to understand who is accessing services, but also to track who remains excluded, and policies and services should be co-designed and delivered with migrant women, fostering trust, relevance and ownership.
Throughout these steps, flexibility is key. Services must adapt to the realities of women’s lives: their caregiving responsibilities, legal statuses, and cultural contexts. Informal spaces for connection and learning, rather than bureaucratic offices, can often make the biggest difference.
The bigger picture: beyond silos, beyond labels
Despite growing recognition, most public policies still fail to address the intersectional nature of discrimination. Migrant women face compounded exclusion, not just as women, or migrants, or workers, but at the cross-section of all these identities. And yet, laws and data collection still tend to treat these factors in isolation.
“There should be a holistic approach,” as Ahrabare mentioned, “really seeing the issue as something global, where different aspects are intertwined, from employment to access to housing, language courses, fighting violence against women… All these different aspects that often work in silos actually should be understood as interconnected”.
She stressed the need for equality, not just policies that look fair on paper, but those that address systemic barriers in practice. From the gender pay gap and occupational segregation to housing discrimination and legal uncertainty, migrant women are often left behind in systems that were never built for them.
Integration starts with listening
If there’s one takeaway from the exchange of practices and knowledge shared throughout the recent European training on migrant women’s integration organised by the EU-funded CONSOLIDATE project, it’s this: change is possible, but only if cities are willing to listen, adapt, and collaborate.
Migrant women are not invisible. They are an active part of our societies, and what they need is not charity, but recognition — and a seat at the table.
As cities across Europe move toward more inclusive models of integration, the most successful ones will be those that turn policies into partnerships, and services into shared solutions.
Cover image credit: Alvin Sadewo.
