An increased outreach capacity towards refugees and a higher success rate in new locations for the NGO partner SINGA

Thanks to The Human Safety Net’s “Scale Up Impact” initiative, NGO partner SINGA has increased the rate of aspiring refugees becoming entrepreneurs and successfully breathing new life in their start-ups. 

The Scale-Up Impact initiative allowed SINGA to strengthen existing entrepreneurship support programs through best practices sharing, increase capacities in Berlin and Lyon, and create new programs in Nantes, Lille, and soon Strasbourg. 

The goal was to redefine, strengthen, or launch entrepreneurship programs for aspiring refugee entrepreneurs from the ideation phase until the successful opening of their business. Now, specific workshops are available for participants and they cover different business sectors, including tech, food, arts and culture, so that more aspiring refugee entrepreneurs reach the final stage of the program and start their company.

With the activation of a new pool of mentoring experts from leading companies, plus coaching and support helping the refugees until they are ready to welcome their first clients, refugees have a higher chance of success in their project.

The Human Safety Net and SINGA are aiming to double the capacity of SINGA incubators to support business creation, reaching up to 400 entrepreneurs with a migrant background and enabling the creation of 130 additional businesses by 2023, Outreach capacity has greatly increased since the beginning of the THSN Scale Up Impact, since over 700 newcomers have already been reached through awareness raising activities

The businesses already launched come in all shapes and sizes: 

 

Artsy Crafts is a social business which imports traditional jute artifacts made by mothers in Bangladesh to support access to education for their children. Bengali entrepreneurs Konock and Sawar were supported in Lyon over 2021/2022, and now sell their products locally and in the SINGA Store in Nantes.

Masood and Benafshah were part of the first ever incubation cohort in Nantes. They now run a catering business,Cuisine Afghane, promoting delicious Afghan cuisine 

Omar Aldalati, a SINGA entrepreneur in Paris, said, “I have worked several years on an economic model as a research project, [Thanks to SINGA] it has finally become a business!” Omar founded Ebla Technologies, providing online support service for micro, small and medium-sized enterprises. 

Moreover, support from the Scale Up Impact initiative has allowed a standardized monitoring and evaluation methodology across all locations, enabling each SINGA incubator to assess their impact better and increase the focus of their activities to meet the needs of entrepreneurs and their communities.

In addition, the initiative allowed the consolidation ofits network of local incubators (Chapters) with the creation of SINGA Global in 2020to provide a, systemic, and long-term vision to ensure sustainable impact scaling.

SINGA was one of The Human Safety Net’s very first partners, and their Parisian incubator benefited from The Human Safety Net’ support to grow locally and empower refugees through entrepreneurship.

The Human Safety Net launched ‘Scale Up Impact’ in 2020 as a multi-year strategy to amplify its social impact on the most vulnerable families and aspiring entrepreneurs. The initiative has invested €7 million between 2020-2022 to enable pioneering NGOs to replicate their successful models and transform people’s lives nationally.