Late at night, Maria walks home through quiet streets, avoiding the busy corners and skipping the local community centre where she knows language classes are being held. She doesn’t want to draw attention to herself. She tries to avoid busy streets at night, keeps quiet when dealing with authorities, sticks to trusted friends and family instead of official programmes, and dresses and behaves in ways that help her blend in.
“A lot of young women are applying what we call ‘invisibility strategies’ to make themselves safe,” explains Kaja Skowronska, in charge of migration at Nantes Ville and Metropole.
These are choices that women make, aiming to protect themselves from discrimination, harassment, or uncertainty around their legal status. “It’s logical,” adds Skowronska, “but they are also making themselves invisible to us.”
For example, women who avoid community centres, language classes, or job programmes may miss out on important support, making it more difficult for cities to connect them with resources and opportunities. While women who are raising children often have stronger links to schools and health services, many spend most of their time at home while men go out to work. As a result, they can remain less visible to integration services.
“It’s very important that when we talk about the needs of migrants, we also consider the specific needs of women,” says Kristel Danel, Policy Officer for Asylum, Refugees and Undocumented Migrants at Ghent Municipality.
Recognising that women often remain more isolated, particularly among new migrant communities, Ghent has been working to better understand their needs. “To us, it is also very important to look at our blind spots. When we are talking about people living in our cities, who are we not reaching at the moment? Female migrants are really one of the groups we want to give more attention to,” explains Danel.
In Gothenburg, to access housing, residents earn ‘queue points’ over the years, often through employment or long-term registration. Women who have relied on a partner for income, stayed at home to care for children, or been unable to work may have few or no points of their own. This becomes a real challenge if they separate or leave an abusive relationship. For women already trying to stay safe through invisible strategies, this can block access to housing and make it harder for municipal services to reach them. Navigating the system often means being redirected between different departments, which can reinforce invisibility and leave women without the support they need.
Gothenburg is actively working to address this challenge. Paul Wallner, Coordinator for Refugee Settlement at Gothenburg Municipality, explains that the city is strengthening its internal structures so frontline staff know which department is responsible for each case. The aim is to reduce the back-and-forth that can undermine trust in the system among migrant communities, particularly among women.
To address this, housing counsellors are receiving training to better identify vulnerability, while coordination between departments is being strengthened. This helps ensure that women at risk, due to economic dependence, domestic violence, or other challenges, can be directed quickly to the support they need. In practice, this means women’s perspectives and safety concerns will be systematically integrated into service delivery, alongside stronger cross-sector coordination and housing advice tools developed with direct input from users.
The city of Milan also faces coordination challenges, especially in the labour market. “In many cases, some services address people’s needs, but they are a bit scattered,” says Alex Cedro, Head of the Administrative Procedures and Compliance Support Unit, Directorate for Welfare and Health, Rights and Inclusion Department at Milan Municipality.
The city’s approach to integration combines mapping opportunities, focus groups, and orientation workshops to better understand the needs and aspirations of migrant women. “A cohesive pathway is not always present, so we wanted to focus on their needs and to help them integrate all the different possibilities that the cities offer,” explains Cedro.
Participants are supported through skills assessments, professional training, language courses and continuous tutoring. Selected companies also offer adapted work placements. “We intend to involve two companies to help us to create a pathway to integration for women with children,” adds Stefano Vitaloni, from the Welfare and Health Directorate at Milan Municipality. By engaging both migrant women and employers, Milan’s approach highlights the shared responsibility required to support long-term employment and economic autonomy.
Milan is planning to hire a coordinator to streamline the communication between the job unit and the department working on migration and integration. In a similar move, Ghent has hired a community worker who, together with the Integration Policy Coordinator, is mapping women’s needs to co-design a sustainable participation model that will inform the city’s integration strategy over time.
The city works with migrant-led NGOs, but many of their senior staff are men. “When designing a migrant integration strategy and doing it in co-design with the target group, it is very important that women also get a voice in that process. If there are specific needs, we also take that up in our migrant integration strategy,” adds Danel.
Also aiming for better co-design, Cluj-Napoca’s plan for inclusion is based on a three-pillar strategy: create an inter-institutional group, enhance the role of the one-stop shop, and aggregate the existing research on migrants’ needs. And “we plan to involve women in all three pillars,” says Ioana Bozan, Psychologist at Cluj Metropolitan Area, especially when it comes to plans for a one-stop shop.
“We want them to take ownership of the space,” Bozan explains. “We are thinking about activities only for women and to provide childcare, translation and means for transportation during those meetings.”
The city is also building a shared understanding of migrants’ needs across the metropolitan area. This work combines institutional research with direct participation from migrant communities, with a particular focus on women. The findings from this process will feed into a multi-stakeholder working group, including migrant representatives, that will develop a shared vision for integration to guide local actions.
“Until now, Cluj-Napoca focused a lot on Ukrainian women,” explains Bozan, “but our plan at one-stop shop is to include all migrant women, regardless of nationality or ethnicity.”
By listening to migrant women, involving them in co-design processes and embedding their perspectives into data collection, service design and coordination structures, cities are not only addressing inequality. They are strengthening social cohesion and building more inclusive urban communities.
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The EU-funded project CONSOLIDATE accompanies cities in implementing integration strategies focusing on three communities of practice: housing, employment and one-stop shops. The good practices for migrant women’s integration mentioned above are part of the exchanges with peers.
“That’s one big achievement that wouldn’t have been possible without the project,” says Wallner.
CONSOLIDATE’s focus on migrant women integration has shaped activities, such as delivering a training on addressing women’s needs in local integration strategies, publishing a policy brief and sharing good practices from Vienna and Berlin.
