3 Takeaways as a Start-Up in the Humanitarian Sector
What we’ve learned as a start-up working towards financial inclusion for refugees
We recently attended the FinTech Solutions for Refugees Summit organised by Village Capital & PayPal in Berlin. We reflect on what we’ve learned from the event and from our overall experience as a start-up in the humanitarian sector.
Aside from our work to enable access to finance for small businesses, we’re passionate about using our platform to further financial inclusion for refugees and other displaced persons.
To this end, since our inception, we’ve interacted with humanitarian organizations, local and international NGOs, governments and the private sector to get an overview of what each brings to the landscape. Most importantly, we’ve had the chance to interact directly with refugees, both here in Kenya and in Turkey, to understand how our platform could help address their needs. We’ve also been helped by the invaluable research done on the subject.
But as a new-comer to the humanitarian world and moreover as a start-up, we’ve felt that a space for dialogue between different actors was still missing.
More importantly, a dialogue which deals head on with the “big questions”, i.e. sector-wide, underlying issues, was needed.
This dialogue is what we got to experience at the FinTech Solutions for Refugees Summit held recently in Berlin. Over the course of the summit, we attempted to answer some of these big questions with stakeholders across the board. From these discussions, we took away 3 learnings that we’d like to share. We hope that these will help other start-ups attempting to navigate the humanitarian sector, as well as organizations interested in working with start-ups.
#1. Work in ecosystems, not alone
Solutions which attempt to enable access to finance for refugees deal with constraints at multiple levels. Firstly, they need to consider whether there is a real demand for such a solution among refugees. Secondly, solutions which address access to financial services cannot ignore the interplay of financial service regulations at national and international levels. Next, and particularly for solutions that leverage technology, there is also the question of digital literacy, device possession and connectivity.
All of these considerations are not insurmountable, but getting past them requires input and action from different actors.
Creating an established channel for regular exchanges between start-ups, humanitarian organizations and financial services entities can help ensure that solutions are designed keeping all these considerations in mind since the outset.
Above all, it’s important that such a channel be established formally, so that all parties know that they can turn to it whenever needed rather than on ad-hoc bases.
#2. Approach refugees as you would any other customer segment
When we first started thinking of how Gravity’s platform could help refugees, we had a very different solution in mind. However, our interactions with refugees quickly led us to realise that our platform could instead be used to address more pressing needs that refugees had, i.e. improving access to livelihood opportunities, than what we’d initially imagined. We’re aware that we’re not the only ones experiencing this. Other start-ups and the private sector at large do, too.
This is perhaps because there’s a tendency to think of refugees’ needs as homogeneous across the different regions they are hosted in, the varying immigration status they may have and consequently the services they are able to avail with respect to their legal status.
Just as any other company which tests the appetite for its product through user and market research, so should companies designing products for refugees.
This means treating refugees as any other customer base by segmenting them, interacting with them and incorporating their feedback into the solution.
However, it can be difficult for start-ups to directly interact with refugees because they are often not accessible. Here is where the organizations who do have this access can play an important role by publishing research for preliminary insight. On the other hand, there need to be more opportunities created for companies to directly interact with refugees. These interactions need to be carried out in an ethical manner, perhaps guided by humanitarian organizations or other experts who are familiar with the protocol of interacting with persons of concern.
#3. Create a common language for start-ups and humanitarians
This works at two levels.
- Especially with respect to tech solutions for refugees, both start-ups and humanitarian organizations need to do their homework to understand the other side. This comes down to articulating the capacity of a tech solution to help address functional requirements specific to a humanitarian operation. At a very basic level, start-ups need to translate their solutions’ capacity in a manner that can easily be digested by those not very familiar with technical jargon.
- It’s often the case that there’s a mismatch in the ‘culture’ between start-ups and humanitarian organizations. By their very nature, start-ups need to focus on gaining traction in the short run. On the other hand, because of the delicacy and scale of their operations, humanitarian organizations may need multiple rounds of deliberation before they can give the green light. This becomes even more problematic when considering how a solution is funded.
Being more transparent and precise on the expected timeline for a project, mixing sources of funding to diversify the actors bearing the risk and clearly outlining each partner’s concerns can all help reduce this ‘mismatch’.
But perhaps acknowledging that this mismatch exists could be the very first step towards respecting one another’s constraints.
We’re extremely thankful to Village Capital and PayPal for providing us with this opportunity to put our heads together with all those within the ecosystem. Going forward, we hope that we’ll see more opportunities which can help unify the varying efforts to achieve the common goal of accelerating long-term, sustainable financial inclusion for refugees.
