TINDOUF, Algeria — Sahrawi refugees have been dependent on humanitarian aid to meet their basic needs for more than four decades. They live on support provided by the United Nations or other civil society organizations to help improve everyday life in the refugee camps. However, as such help is decreasing with the refugee crisis spreading across Europe and the Middle East, some Sahrawis are becoming entrepreneurs.

Ambarka Mohamed Salem decided to turn humanitarian assistance into an opportunity for Sahrawi women to become self-sufficient. Like her peers, she fled the Moroccan-occupied territory of Laayoune, in the disputed Western Sahara region, when she was 10 years old.

“I first arrived to the camps with my parents on Dec. 25, 1975,” she told Al-Monitor. Forty-one years later, Mohamed Salem is the director of a factory that makes "melhfas," a traditional garment for Sahrawi women. The project, which began June 5, 2013, is financed by the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida), a government agency. The factory, made of mud bricks, is surrounded by sand. Inside it, 18 women work six hours a day, six days a week. The type of melhfa made there measures 6 meters by 1.6 meters (20 feet by 5 feet). "It is made of imported cloth from Mauritania,’’ Mohamed Salem said.

The trading industry has long connected the camps with the Mauritanian town of Azwairat. So, Mauritanian and Sahrawi merchants have found a company that provides transportation to and from the camps. Mauritania and Algeria are the only countries Sahrawis can enter without a passport, including even Spain, the former colonial ruler of the Western Sahara. Because of the convenience and proximity of Mauritania, Sahrawis travel there to buy the raw material for any business that they want to start in the camps.