Investing In The Future Of Work For Remote Refugee Workforce

With research inputs from Dhwani Dagliya

According to UNHCR, there are approximately 26 million refugees globally, around half of whom are under the age of 18. It is estimated that 1 in every 113 people around the world is either an asylum-seeker, internally displaced, or a refugee. Further, the rate of displacement is estimated to be one person displaced every 3 seconds. That is 20 people forced from their homes, every minute, 28,300 every day. About 84% of the refugees are hosted by developing countries. Already facing financial pressures, shrinking economies, and rising unemployment, the presence of large refugee populations has created an additional burden for the host-countries.

Refugees are often marginalized as a group in their host countries. They are faced with both structural and legal barriers to employment in their host countries. Many host countries have very stringent and restrictive employment laws and regulations for refugees that have severe adverse effects on the economic independence and overall well-being of the refugee populations. On top of such structural and legal challenges, the refugee populations are also faced with the problem of lack of available job opportunities within the host countries. The World Economic Forum has previously noted –

“There is an urgent need for a scalable, sustainable, and replicable model for job creation. This new narrative for employment needs to not only serve migrant and refugee populations but also host communities. A solution that is not bound by geography, takes into account the opportunities offered by technology, addresses the global skills gap, and utilizes online, skills-based education models could provide a viable solution.”

The creation of remote employment opportunities for refugees would serve not only the refugee population and the host countries but also other more advanced economies that are faced with the problem of the diminishing workforce due to demographic shifts. Chris Chancey, a GP at Amplio Ventures, wrote a blog post making a case for remote refugee workforce as a potential solution for tackling the US’s diminishing workforce problem. The scarcity of workforce might seem like a figment of optimistic imagination in the current COVID-19 climate, however, over the medium-to-long term, the US does indeed face a secular shortage of workforce.

Amplio Ventures’ Refugee Employment Venture Fund

Amplio Ventures recently launched its Refugee Employment Venture Fund (‘REVF’), a seed-stage venture capital fund to invest in and support entrepreneurs reinventing the future of work to foster wider adoption of remote and distributed teams, creating opportunities for employment of remote refugee workforce. The REVF’s mission is to create better outcomes for remote refugee workforce through three distinct channels -

© 2020 Apoorv Karmakar All Rights Reserved

In this post, I wanted to elaborate on our investment strategy and priorities, and how they enable us to make investments that create remote employment opportunities for refugees. It is our belief that by investing in the most innovative and cutting-edge tools and solutions for distributed teams, REVF would help enable more organizations to pivot to more distributed workforce structures and leverage the overtly under-utilized remote refugee workforce.

The Future of Work Sector

The Future of Work is a vast sector with several distinct sub-segments. Merci Victoria Grace of Lightspeed Venture Partners covered the various segments of the Future of Work sector in her brilliant post published on Medium. There can be some variations in how the various sub-segments of the Future of Work sector are classified, however, the detailed distinctions are not germane for this post. Given REVF’s focus on creating a more enabling environment for remote refugee workforce specifically, we will look to prioritize the following sub-segments -

Skill Development

• The quality of and access to reskilling, re-training, and upskilling support will determine how the world’s workforce will perform in the transition underway to remote working and engage with new opportunities in the labor market.
• The success of these solutions would be depending heavily on individuals’ willingness to undertake reskilling, which in turn will (at least) partly determined by the costs and time associated with the reskilling as well as clarity around its potential returns across different scenarios.
• We are especially interested in solutions that provide support and frameworks for industry-specific language and skills training to help upskill refugees in fields where there is a high demand for labor, including using place-based approaches.

Skill Matching

• Refugees have a range of skills and experience, including proficiency in different languages. In addition to professional skills, many refugees having overcome adversity have developed adaptability beneficial for a range of roles. This fast pace of skills evolution has enabled more workers than ever before to bring a wider range of skills and enhanced creativity, dynamism, and productivity to a range of sectors.
• Long-term migration towards distributed teams across will inevitably lead to the high mobility of workers between cities, regions, and countries. In light of ample opportunities for both local and migrant skilled populations, labor mobility within and across borders will soon be the norm.
• The increased labor mobility and the trend towards distributed teams are likely to result in a greater need for international standardization of credentials, certifications, and degrees. Having solutions that facilitate such standardization and/or portability of such diverse credentials, certifications, and degrees would become a necessity going forward, creating an exciting opportunity for early-stage ventures to seize the market.

Employee Engagement

• Refugees are not a homogenous group. They represent a wide range of nationalities and cultural backgrounds that could help to diversify thinking and attract new talent within any business. However, engagement and trust-building in a heterogeneous team comprising of multi-cultural and multi-lingual members can be a challenge.
• Any employment opportunities created for remote refugee workforce would not be sustainable without adequate measures in place to build trust and drive engagement within teams. Thus, solutions that foster trust and engagement within teams would be critical for meaningful inclusion of refugee workforce in distributed or remote work setup.
• We are very interested in solutions that provide non-episodical, real-time, actionable insights that employers and team leaders can rely on for preemptively address evolving trust deficit or disengagement challenges within teams.

Project Management

• Like engagement and trust, adequate tools for ensuring seamless collaboration would be critical to the long-term sustenance of remote employment of the refugee population.
• Owing to the diversity of backgrounds and life experiences, there is a heightened need for effective project management tools in team staffed with remote refugee workforce.
• We believe that the project management and collaboration sub-segment has quite a few market incumbents already leading to fewer entry points for early-stage ventures hoping to acquire market leadership.

Communication

• Communications would perhaps be on the top of the mind for any organization considering migration to a more distributed or remote team. The problem is only made for complex with multi-lingual teams spread across different time zones.
• Effective communications are instrumental in defining, building, and sustaining the organizational culture. While synchronous and asynchronous written communication is still the dominant medium of collaboration, COVID-19 has proven to be a shot in the arm for voice and video apps, which are slowly becoming the default collaboration model.
• We believe there is tremendous potential for innovation in the asynchronous voice and video communication space, which would be especially beneficial for remote refugee workforce that is spread across different time-zones

Recruitment

• By adopting principles of refugee-friendly employment businesses can access a pipeline of diverse talent for roles at every skill level.
• Recruitment tools can help to improve the candidate experience as well as simplify the process and save time to focus on individual candidates by engaging employers with the employees.
• Refugees often miss out on getting hired for competitive roles and positions due to perils of pattern recognition, whereby the hiring teams have little to no insights on how to translate, understand, and quantify the background, experiences, and skillsets of refugees from different geographies and cultures.
• We feel there is tremendous potential for recruitment solutions that would help recruiters avoid the traps of pattern recognition by parsing and translating non-traditional educational and work backgrounds, providing a more inclusive and level playing field for the refugee workforce to compete for coveted employment opportunities.

Cyber Security

• The forced migration to work from home due to COVID has brought to light the need for non-enterprise cybersecurity solutions for securing against cyber threats, to which, unsecured personal/residential internet networks are especially vulnerable.
• Operations in some specific sectors such as financial services were especially disrupted due to concerns over executing trades over unsecured home networks.
• Concerns around cyber and information security are likely going to be one of the more significant hurdles in the widespread acceptance of remote refugees as a part of distributed teams.
• Given that the lack of sophisticated cybersecurity solutions available and deployed in host-countries, there is a very clear need for cybersecurity solutions that address the needs of distributed teams.

At Amplio Ventures, the following three pillars of our impact philosophy are at the heart of everything that we do –

1. Refugee entrepreneurs are worth backing;

2. The refugee workforce is worth leveraging.

3. The global refugee market is one worth servicing.

We are excited about the future of work with the remote refugee workforce as an active participant and are committed to supporting entrepreneurs who share the same vision for the future.