Can You Help Solve The Refugee Crisis?
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Changing the lives of refugees
My name is Neville Gaunt chairman of Your passport2grow and CEO of MindFit. We help people and organisations achieve sustainable performance and growth by changing attitudes and behaviours.
I’m here because I need your to help solve a problem, that is already a global crisis.
Here’s Mugala, 13 years in Nakivale Refugee Camp explaining WHY?
A refugee camp is supposed to be a safe – temporary - haven from war and conflict. But when you’ve spent THIRTEEN years living in one, it becomes your home.
But unlike the homes we know, these are more akin to prisons. There’s virtually nothing you can do to improve the conditions - and you can’t break free.
This is the reality of life today for millions of refugees and it’s getting worse as escalating military and political disasters drive more and more from the only real homes they have known and putting their lives on hold.
It’s a refugee crisis not just a problem
There are two ways refugees can improve conditions for themselves and their families:
1 start a business
2 get a job
Sadly, the infrastructure in most camps doesn’t support either. The few projects aimed at creating entrepreneurs are soon dashed by a lack of leadership and resources. Only a lucky few, those with qualifications, will find a job and move out. But they’re all too rare.
We know we can’t change this overnight, but you can help by joining our group of international business mentors and local in-camp leaders and trainers who all work to a simple model, based on nothing more than commitment and common sense.
Be in no doubt, this an ambitious international collaboration and one that will soon see us bring together a few pockets of early success and make each of them sustainable under the same model.
So the question is........
Will you be a part of a new movement dedicated to improving lives by bringing opportunities to refugees?
The problem: Take the Nakivale Refugee Camp in Uganda, for example, home to 170,000 living in tents and surviving on, at best, the most basic of foods and limited health care. For others it means living in a ghetto in daily fear for their lives.
The one thing that unites them is hope; the sort of hope that drives them on to do things that are characteristics of successful entrepreneurs. WHAT IS THAT?
The team: Meet our project leader – Mugala Dervile - a refugee living in the Nakivale Camp for 13 years – half his life! Here’s his video
The solution – Endless Love Soap
As the name suggests, this was a project in which 50 women and teenage girls were encouraged to make, promote and bring a unique toiletries brand to market. At the most basic level, they used firewood, tablet soap blocks, local fragrances, made it in tin bowls and poured it into plastic bottles they cleaned and reused.
But on a more sustainable level, they learned the sort of self-dependency that gave them strong personal and entrepreneurial foundations, upskilling and empowering them through soft skills training and business mentorships that restored their confidence, resilience and dignity.
Key to their success was first to develop the sort of Can-Do Attitude that not only helped them overcome their fear of failure, ignorance and judgemental people but also tackle everyday issues on a wider level.
They did this via the Happy Ladder Club, building strong personal foundations in an inclusive environment, where each member feels secure within a culture of helping each other.
Within a couple of weeks of the 50 women on the programme, 10 were still working together and growing their business. five (10% - yes, not all will succeed) have given up and the rest are being given extra mentoring to improve what they are doing.
What it Meant to the Women on the Programme
watch their videos
It had its problems:
• Participants had no pencil or notebook to record the lessons.
• High costs of firewood for making the soap.
• Lack of raw materials for soap production for training and starting up.
• Travelling distance of participants.
• The cost and means of advertising the training.
• Poor and limited training equipment.
With your support we can overcome all of these barriers.
With our entrepreneurship model, we can provide training and the materials to startup a business that costs less than $40 per candidate.
Within this $40 we can also pay our local project manager and our local trainers (all of these are refugees in Nakivale) and help them improve their family's lives too.
Why such low cost per candidate? Because we have targeted resources from inside the camp, streamlined and focused the development process plus our international mentors give their training and support for free.
But there’s more:
With your support, we will also develop a job board for the thousands of refugees who have qualifications and skills that need to be shared with employers locally and across the globe.
Feedback: We’ll share the results of each project with you and once live you’ll see the progress of the job site.
The Future?
Nakivale Refugee Settlement is just the start of a new successful and sustainable business model.
Organizer
Neville Gaunt
Organizer