Supporting Refugee Entrepreneurship Globally

In October, 2022 the Five One Labs team had the pleasure of participating in the fifth-annual Refugee Entrepreneurship Summit in Venice hosted by the Refugee Entrepreneurship Network (REN), a global community working to improve the scale and impact of refugee entrepreneurship programs.

With more than 100 practitioners, researchers and supporters from across 19 countries in attendance, the Summit provided the opportunity to share best practices, highlight common challenges and recognize the successes of the innovative migrant and refugee entrepreneurs in programs worldwide.

As part of its participation in the Summit, Five One Labs in partnership with Catalyser, an Australia-based startup incubator for migrant entrepreneurs, facilitated an interactive design thinking session to enable a solutions-focused brainstorm on questions such as: how can we better design corporate partnerships with impact and ensure that the private sector is included in conversations around refugee entrepreneurship? How can we develop a framework that would work well in responding to future humanitarian crises? How can migrants be global champions? How can we design programs that best meet the needs of the communities that we work with?

The Five One Labs team looks forward to continuing to build upon this brainstorm through the REN working groups, and we invite any practitioners who are interested in the topics to join the network and collaborate with us!