8 Inspiring Stories From Refugees Turned Founders
Mursal Hedayat
Mursal was born in Kabul, Afghanistan. She arrived in the UK, as a refugee, with her mother, a civil engineer.
She soon had a sad realisation. Many refugees with advanced academic degrees and skills face enormous difficulties in finding employment. Mainly due to the prejudice that refugees still face in society.
So, Mursal founded Chatterbox. An online language school that employs refugees as teachers and trains them to teach their native languages.
“The beauty of this solution is that it provides meaningful employment for refugees whilst plugging the language skills shortage estimated to cost the UK economy about 3.5 per cent of GDP. This two-way mechanism for integration helps us see refugees as an asset rather than a burden on host communities.” writes Mursal. (Source)
She was named as an Emerging Innovator by Ashoka and listed on the Forbes “Top 30 under 30”.
Manyang Reath Kher
Manyang was one of the Lost Boys of Sudan. A group of 20,000 children who became orphans during the Sudanese Civil War. In 2005, at age 17, he escaped to the United States.
There he created Humanity Helping Sudan. A non-profit “to improve the lives of Sudanese refugees and attempt to battle the problems of an entire displaced population.” (Source)
Humanity Helping Sudan was living off donations and wasn’t having an easy start. And that’s how 734 Coffee was born. A social good business that sells Sudanese coffee and helps refugees learn entrepreneurial skills. They also create scholarship programs that allows children the opportunity to go to college.
Since its inception, 734 Coffee has created more than 100 jobs.
Fereshteh Forough
Fereshteh is the founder and CEO of Code to Inspire, the first school in Afghanistan that teaches girls how to code.
She was born in a refugee camp in Iran after her parents had to leave Afghanistan due to the Soviet invasion. Fereshteh returned to her homeland, for the first time, one year after the fall of the Taliban regime and studied Computer Science in the Herat University where she became a professor in that same subject.
To Fereshteh, financial independence of women is paramount to build Afghanistan 2.0. That’s why she decided to create Code to Inspire.
“To see the transformation in these girls is incredible. They come to our program very shy, having never touched a computer, and now they are very confident, tweeting everyday about their work and getting paid jobs. We show them there are more opportunities for them to use tech as a tool to be in a better financial situation.” (Source)
Code to Inspire has been funded by the Malala Fund and Github and has received Google’s “RISE Award” and the University of California’s “Next Generation Engagement Award”.
Derreck Kayongo
Dr. Derreck Kayongo was born in Uganda. Shortly after a military coup led by General Idi Amin Dada seized power of the country. A violent civil war erupted and Kayongo’s family fled to Kenya where they became refugees.
Derreck went to study in the United States and, on his first day there, he noticed the amount of different soaps that were available in his hotel room. All these different soaps — hand soap, face soap, body soap, shampoo, etc — were all replaced and thrown away after only one use. Drawing from his experience in refugee camps, where soap is a scarce asset, Derreck and his wife Sarah founded Global Soap. “A life-changing international aid organization that collects discarded soap from hotels, reprocesses it and distributes it to vulnerable populations worldwide. This simple idea fights the #1 killers of children in many at-risk communities: hygiene-related diseases.” (Source)
Now active in 32 countries, the partnership between Global Soap and Clean the World has helped reduce child deaths in 30% globally since 2009.
Tan Le
When she was 4, Tan Le spent five days and nights on a small boat (disguised as a fishing boat) in the China sea with her mother and grandmother. Her mother held a poison vial firmly in her hand in case they were boarded by a pirate ship. In that extreme circumstance, all of them would drink the poison.
This was a common precaution for those trying to leave Vietnam and find harbour in Australia.
Tan Le studied law but soon was attracted by the world of tech. First she created an online children’s tutoring company. Then a business that supported companies in sending text messages to customers. That business escalated quickly and they were soon handling 150 million text messages a month. At 26, she sold the company.
“After I sold my first business… I didn’t want to create a widget or another app… I wanted to explore questions of science and venture into a field that would stop me having to pivot every five or so years,” (Source)
That exploration led to Emotiv. Their breakthrough came in the creation of an algorithm that could map the electrical impulses in the brain’s cortex.
Emotiv launched their first consumer product, the Epoc headset. “a wireless, portable EEG (electroencephalogram) device that, instead of the large machines found in hospitals that cost in the tens of thousands of dollars, would ‘read’ a user’s emotions and let them move objects shown on a computer screen, as Le demonstrated in her TED talk. It could also let people fly a toy helicopter, simply by thinking “lift,” close curtains, play games, move a robotic limb and even control an electric wheelchair by mapping facial expressions to movement commands.” (Source)
“When you look into the future, I can’t possibly imagine a world where we are not directly interfacing with this very powerful machine that each one of us has inside our heads”
Nirary Dacho
In recent years Australia has received more than 12 thousand Syrian and Iraqi refugees. Although these refugees report a positive settlement experience, reports show that only 17% of them are able to find a job in the following 18 months of arrival. (Source)
Nirary, a Syrian national with a master’s degree in web science, went to 100 job interviews with no success. “Initially I was very confident but, after 10, 20 applications with no response, I began to think, ‘No one will employ me.’” (Source)
It was then that he decided to create Refugee Talent. A company that connects skilled refugees with possible employers.
“They come here and they want to work, they are impatient to work. Both men and women, have had very successful careers… Some of the men were almost in tears when we interviewed them about just sitting at home. They want to get off the dole as quickly as possible, they want to work.” says professor Jock Collins from the University of Technology Sydney to The Guardian. (Source)
Refugee Talent’s platform struck an immediate chord with more than 500 job applicants and 150 companies registering.
Nirary and his co-founder Anna Robson were named in the Forbes’ “30 under 30 list” for 2017.
Ahmed Badr
In 2006, Ahmed’s home in Baghdad was destroyed. Bombed by militia troops. His family became refugees in Syria for two and a half years before moving to the United States.
There he started a blog about his story and found it “incredibly empowering”. Not only because he realised people cared about his story but also because, by sharing it, he was breaking down stereotypes and negative attitudes toward refugees. That was how Narratio was born. A platform that empowers young people through storytelling. Narratio publishes poetry, photography, art and narrative from displaced youth from around the world.
Ahmed has been named one of UN’s Youth Leaders for 2018 and Narration has been lauded by the NPR, United Nations, We Are Family Foundation, SAP, Instagram, and many others.
Tey Al-Rjula
Tey is an invisible man.
This is because Tey was born in Kuwait, during the Gulf War, when the birth registries were destroyed. As such, he does not have a birth certificate, and even if copies were to exist, neither he, nor the issuing authority could possibly verify it.
The term “invisible people” is used to describe those who do not have a birth certificate. Without an identity recognised by a sovereign state they do not have access to basic human rights such as education, health care or banking.
In 2014, Tey started his asylum application in a refugee camp in the Netherlands, where he was forced to move after his work permit of five years was terminated. Here, for two years, he felt the pain of thousands of Syrian refugees unable to verify the authenticity of their documents.
Did you know that when a refugee registers their identity in a refugee camp all they receive is a 80g piece of paper? That fragile paper becomes their identity. The camp holds no record of them. So, if they happen to lose that paper, they have to undergo all the registration process again. If they move to another camp, the camps’ administrations do not communicate between themselves and they have to undergo another registration. All food vouchers and aid vouchers are on paper. Paper, paper, paper. When Tey returned home after 2 years, having lived in 5 different camps, he had amassed 14kg of paper.
The problem became obvious to him. Weak, outdated, paper-based identity systems. Constantly subject to fraud, loss of theft.
It was in one refugee camp that Tey thought of Tykn and started his mission to create digital identity management tools that help NGOs and governments in providing access to human rights.
Vulnerable populations such as refugees suffer first hand the problems of siloed, paper-based identity infrastructures. Their identities are in constant risk of loss, theft or fraud. We’ve been in their position. Unable to prove our past, unable to move forward. We’ve spent years fighting for our own identities.
At Tykn we are working to help NGOs and governments help people better through the implementation of Digital Identity infrastructures. Creating access to human rights through digital identities. Bringing justice to the world. Because people matter.
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