The Syrian civil war has displaced millions internally, and forced over six million to flee across the country’s border to seek refuge in neighboring countries and Europe. This has left half of Syria’s pre-war population dependent on life-saving assistance.
Alongside this, countries that once welcomed refugees are now facing the reality of protracted displacement in addition to grappling with preexisting challenges such as overburdened infrastructure and social services, income disparity, and labor market distortions. This combination of factors has contributed to a toxic public sentiment that falsely characterizes the presence of refugees as a burden to the countries hosting them.
Our job was re-framing the narrative.
Design Challenge // How might we elevate the positive contributions of refugees to their host countries?
Clients // US Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration, Government of Canada, Global nonprofit
Project // Research, prototyping, service design & launch of an initiative supporting refugee-owned small businesses in host countries including Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon.
Role // Project Lead
Impact // During a time when most nonprofit organizations were focused on delivering critical humanitarian assistance to refugees and displaced people, I was hired to lead a team that would research, design, and launch an innovative programme that supported refugee, migrant and host-country owned small businesses.
The challenges of designing programmes in conflict-affected countries are numerous, however the single greatest obstacle we faced early on was a matter of public perception:
”Refugees are taking our jobs.”
“Refugees get handouts when unemployment is skyrocketing.”
…The list went on.
We needed buy-in from skeptical local stakeholders to make our work possible. To succeed, we needed to re-frame the narrative.
Thanks to some incredible local partnerships, we already had hard data to show the positive economic contributions of hundreds of refugee-owned businesses - data that didn’t exist before we set out to record it... But we also knew that perceptions are grounded in emotion, and emotions don’t always listen to data.
So we used this data to tell stories. Stories of entrepreneurs who happened to be refugees who were starting businesses, creating jobs for other refugees and their hosts, paying taxes, providing social services and contributing to vibrant local economies…against all odds.
This wasn’t a communications strategy. Storytelling became a critical element of our programme design - Grounded in empathy, it changed the way we spoke about the entrepreneurs we served, and the services we would offer, by reframing what was seen as a problem into an opportunity.
This approach paid off, we were able to get the buy-in we needed, and the programme launched with many successes. Although in many ways tragic as this has become the largest protracted refugee crisis of our time, the programme has since grown into a thriving network of over 2,500 refugee, migrant and host-country owned small businesses.
Duration of Engagement // 2015 - 2018