SAN CARLOS, Calif., December 13, 2023 — A new program that trains refugees, displaced by the Somali civil war, to become entrepreneurs and start their own small businesses has launched within the Kobe, Hilaweyn, and Melkadida refugee camps in Ethiopia.

Village Enterprise, the nonprofit seeking to end extreme poverty in rural Africa through entrepreneurship, innovation, and collective action, is expanding its DREAMS for Refugees program following success in refugee settlements in Uganda.

DREAMS (Delivering Resilient Enterprises and Market Systems) for Refugees is a partnership that merges Village Enterprise’s poverty graduation program with Mercy Corps’ expertise in market systems development to equip refugees with the skills, resources, and market-linkages to start sustainable businesses and graduate from extreme poverty. DREAMS has been operating in Uganda since 2022, and the expansion to Ethiopia is supported by donations from the IKEA Foundation and the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation.

DREAMS will impact more than 200,000 lives in Ethiopia and Uganda. Photo credit: Ezra Millstein for Mercy Corps.

The Kobe, Hilaweyn, and Melkadida refugee camps are located near the southern border of Ethiopia and home to approximately 130,000 refugees. As DREAMS launches in Ethiopia, it is providing the first cohort of 1,200 refugee entrepreneurs living in extreme poverty with seed funding of $500 to start their own businesses. Having fled war in Somalia, with little prospect of being able to return, the first-time entrepreneurs are also receiving comprehensive training delivered by Village Enterprise’s expert business mentors. Over a nine week training course, the entrepreneurs develop skills such as financial literacy, bookkeeping, and creating business plans to support them to launch their enterprises.

In Bidi Bidi Refugee Settlement and Rhino Camp Refugee Settlement in Uganda, DREAMS has trained 4,800 entrepreneurs to date. Working in groups of three, these first-time entrepreneurs have launched successful businesses in areas such as retail, livestock, and agriculture. In total across both Uganda and Ethiopia, DREAMS will reach more than 33,000 households and impact more than 200,000 lives.

The DREAMS model is aiming to transform refugee relief. Traditional support for refugees is based on providing basic subsistence, such as food rations or shelter, rather than creating opportunities for people to become self-reliant. DREAMS won the Larsen Lam ICONIQ Impact Award for Refugees in 2021 and is part of Village Enterprise’s broader goal of lifting 20 million people in rural Africa out of extreme poverty by 2030.

With 400 million people in Africa now living in extreme poverty, poverty alleviation solutions that work are more important than ever. Refugees are facing more acute challenges than at any other point since World War II, with approximately 6.6 million refugees living in camps globally. What are initially established as temporary measures to accommodate an influx of people seeking a safe haven, refugee camps often become protracted settlements.

Dianne Calvi, CEO and President of Village Enterprise, said:
“The expansion of DREAMS into Ethiopia is a great step forward in addressing two of the biggest challenges facing the world today—forced displacement and extreme poverty. With refugee numbers at record levels, as well as increases in food prices and decreases in aid budgets, it’s more important than ever that we are providing sustainable solutions and equipping refugees with the training, resources, and markets to become self-reliant.

We are proud that this program will help empower so many refugees in Ethiopia to rebuild their lives, and in partnership with Mercy Corps, we’re looking for more foundations and individuals to join us so that DREAMS can reach even more vulnerable families and communities across Africa.”

Tjada D’Oyen McKenna, CEO of Mercy Corps, said: “As conflicts around the world become more complex and protracted, displacement is now measured in decades rather than months or years. The system that was designed to provide urgent, lifesaving assistance in response to short-term displacement has struggled to serve millions of refugees who have put their aspirations on hold. Refugees deserve better. We’re thrilled to expand DREAMS to Ethiopia in partnership with Village Enterprise and to support refugees and the communities in which they live to thrive.”

Per Heggenes, CEO of the IKEA Foundation, said: “People who are forced to flee need the chance to rebuild their lives so they can support themselves and their families. We’ve seen firsthand that refugees have extraordinary talent and drive. We’re proud to support DREAMS to empower these communities to find pathways toward economic self-reliance.”

Barri Shorey, Senior Program Officer, Refugees at the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation, said: “We’re thrilled to support the expansion of the DREAMS program for refugees and host communities in Ethiopia. This partnership between Village Enterprise and Mercy Corps targets families who have been displaced from their homes and supports them on their challenging journeys to financial security. In a time of increasing and longer-term displacement, we are excited to invest in solutions that support refugee households to actually envision and build a healthy and productive future for themselves and their children.”

Media enquiries:
Village Enterprise – villageenterprise@wearesevenhills.com

About Village Enterprise
Village Enterprise’s mission is to end extreme poverty in rural Africa through entrepreneurship, innovation, and collective action. We work with vulnerable women, refugees, and youth who are most impacted by climate change, conflict, and displacement, and equip them with skills and resources to launch climate-smart businesses, build savings, and put themselves and their families onto a sustainable path out of extreme poverty. Village Enterprise has started over 80,000 businesses, trained over 274,000 first-time entrepreneurs, and positively transformed the lives of over 1,656,000 people in Uganda, Kenya, Rwanda, Ethiopia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Congo-Brazzaville, Mozambique, and Tanzania. Learn more at villageenterprise.org.

About Mercy Corps
Mercy Corps is a global team of nearly 6,000 humanitarians working to create a world where everyone can prosper. In more than 40 countries affected by crisis, disaster, poverty and climate change we work alongside communities, local governments, forward-thinking corporations and social entrepreneurs to meet urgent needs and develop long-term solutions to make lasting change possible. Learn more at www.mercycorps.org.

About the IKEA Foundation
The IKEA Foundation is a strategic philanthropy that focuses its grant making efforts on tackling the two biggest threats to children’s futures: poverty and climate change. It currently grants more than €200 million per year to help improve family incomes and quality of life while protecting the planet from climate change. Since 2009, the IKEA Foundation has granted more than €1.5 billion to create a better future for children and their families.

In 2021 the Board of the IKEA Foundation decided to make an additional €1 billion available over the next five years to accelerate the reduction of Greenhouse Gas emissions.

Learn more at: www.ikeafoundation.org or by following them on LinkedIn or Twitter.

About the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation
International hotelier Conrad N. Hilton established the grantmaking foundation that bears his name in 1944 to help people living in poverty and experiencing disadvantage worldwide. Today, the work continues, concentrating on efforts to ensure healthy early childhood development and sustainable livelihoods for youth, support young people transitioning out of foster care, improve access to housing and support services for people experiencing homelessness, identify solutions to safe water access, and lift the work of Catholic sisters. Additionally, following selection by an independent, international jury, the Foundation annually awards the $2.5 million Conrad N. Hilton Humanitarian Prize to an organization doing extraordinary work to reduce human suffering. The Foundation is one of the world’s largest, with approximately $6.7 billion in assets. It has awarded grants to date totaling more than $3 billion, $435 million worldwide in 2022. Please visit www.hiltonfoundation.org for more information.

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In northwestern Uganda, the Rhino Camp Refugee Settlement is home to over 120,000 refugees who have fled conflict, environmental disasters, or other significant shocks in their home countries. One of the refugees living in Rhino Camp is Susan, a 40-year-old widow with four children, who also looks after her nephew and grandchild.

During the war in South Sudan, Susan was forced to flee her home in 2018. After making the difficult journey to Rhino Camp in Uganda, she was provided only a single tarp for shelter. Together with her children, she constructed a small grass-thatched house using grass they found and bricks they made themselves. Unfortunately, termites found their way into her home and began eating away at its structure, causing water to leak in whenever it rained. Susan was also provided monthly food rations from the refugee settlement, but quickly discovered it wasn’t enough to sustain her family throughout the entire month. To make their food rations last longer, they began skipping meals—eating only once per day. On top of all of this, Susan’s children were forced to drop out of school when she wasn’t able to afford their school fees.

Susan is one of more than 10 million refugees worldwide who rely on humanitarian aid to meet their basic needs—such as food, water, shelter, and basic healthcare. But as aid organizations struggle with budget cuts and a global rise in refugee populations, tangible support has been subject to change or even disappear without a moment’s notice—leaving refugees like Susan without the basic necessities to help them survive, let alone plan for the future.

The refugee crisis has never been more severe during our lifetimes—currently, there are more refugees worldwide than at any point since World War II. With this in mind, DREAMS is on a mission to transform refugee relief as we know it today.

Pictured: Susan at her retail business where she sells clothes and other textiles in her community.

DREAMS (Delivering Resilient Enterprises and Market Systems) is an innovative, first-of-its-kind program which combines Village Enterprise’s poverty graduation program with Mercy Corps’ expertise in market systems development. Where most refugee relief programs only provide short-term humanitarian aid for a long-term problem, DREAMS offers a long-term, sustainable solution by empowering refugees to become economically self-reliant. By equipping refugees with the training, resources, and enhanced markets to launch small businesses in their communities, refugees are able to become entrepreneurs, generating reliable incomes and putting themselves and their families onto a sustainable pathway out of extreme poverty. Ultimately, DREAMS provides refugees a safe place to land where they can get back on their feet, provide for their families in the midst of so much unknown, and start to dream again about their families’ future.

Through DREAMS, Susan learned how to launch a small business as well as the financial literacy skills needed to operate and expand her business into different markets. After working with her DREAMS mentor to select a viable business and get connected with market suppliers, Susan—along with her two business partners from Rhino Camp—used their business grant from Village Enterprise to launch a retail store buying and selling clothes.

Almost one year later, Susan is just a few weeks away from graduating from Village Enterprise and her family’s situation has greatly improved. Using the profits from her retail business, Susan has been able to supplement the settlement’s monthly food rations and provide three consistent, healthy meals a day for her family. She’s also been able to afford school fees for two of her children who are back in school full time, and has plans for her other children to return back to school soon. On top of all of this, she’s been able to construct a new home, with iron sheets for the roof and reinforced doors, providing her family with a safe and stable place to call home.

Pictured: Susan outside of her newly constructed home which she paid for using the profits from her retail business.

“Susan’s story is one of the 200,000 people whose lives will be transformed by DREAMS over the next few years,” says Winnie Auma, Chief Program Officer at Village Enterprise. “To better support refugees, it’s so important to keep the long-term vision in mind and have assistance that goes beyond meeting the immediate needs of refugees and instead helps them get back on their feet and plan for their futures in a dignified and sustainable way.”

As a Fast Company 2023 World Changing Ideas Award winner, DREAMS aims to transform not only refugee relief—it strives to provide a new model for ending extreme poverty in the world’s most challenging environments, supporting millions of people globally in achieving financial autonomy.

DREAMS originally began as a pilot program in Uganda’s Bidi Bidi Refugee Settlement in 2018, and formally launched operations in northern Uganda in 2022. It will also launch operations in Ethiopia’s Dollo Ado Refugee Settlement in the weeks ahead. Across the two countries, DREAMS will reach more than 33,000 households and will impact more than 200,000 lives—but this is just the beginning. Building off the program’s success, Village Enterprise and Mercy Corps are looking for the funding to expand DREAMS to more regions and countries across Africa.

As Susan looks to the future, she has a renewed sense of hope for her family. She’s excited to expand her retail business with the possibility of opening another branch in a nearby village to diversify her income. She’s even become the chairperson of her business savings group comprised of 30 business owners from her community. Susan not only helps organize their weekly meetings, but she offers guidance and encouragement as they collectively save for household and business assets together.

“I feel very confident and respected by my children and community,” says Susan. “Thank you for helping a hopeless widow have hope again.”

About DREAMS

Funded by Conrad N. Hilton Foundation, ICONIQ Impact, IKEA Foundation, Sea Grape Foundation, and The Patchwork Collective, DREAMS won the 2021 Larsen Lam ICONIQ Impact Award for Refugees managed by Lever for Change, and was most recently awarded Fast Company’s 2023 World Changing Ideas Award for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. DREAMS will also be studied in an independent, randomized controlled trial (RCT) conducted by IDinsight, which will provide valuable research to be used across the international development and humanitarian aid sectors to better support refugees in the future.

Learn more about DREAMS

The post Susan’s Story: DREAMS and Hope for the Future appeared first on Village Enterprise.

DREAMS (Delivering Resilient Enterprises and Market Systems) merges Village Enterprise’s poverty graduation program with Mercy Corps’ expertise in market systems development in order to equip refugees with the skills, resources, and markets to start sustainable businesses and graduate from extreme poverty.

“What makes DREAMS so special is the unique partnership between Village Enterprise and Mercy Corps that drives innovation as we take on two of the biggest challenges facing the world today—forced displacement and poverty,” said Liz Corbishley, Chief Strategy and Partnerships Officer at Village Enterprise. “DREAMS started as a project focused on providing sustainable support to refugees, and it has grown into a new model for ending extreme poverty—equipping the most vulnerable households with the skills, resources, and markets to become self-reliant.”

Rose Kujang, a refugee from South Sudan, harvests sesame for her business in Uganda as part of DREAMS. Photo credit: Jjumba Martin for Mercy Corps

The first-of-its-kind model is already transforming the lives of refugees living in the Bidi Bidi Refugee Settlement in Uganda, and DREAMS is about to launch in Dollo Ado Refugee Camp in Ethiopia. In total, DREAMS will reach more than 33,000 households across the two countries and impact more than 200,000 lives.

The model will be studied in a randomized controlled trial conducted by IDinsight, providing valuable evidence and insights that can be used by the international development and humanitarian aid sectors to better serve refugees and others living in extreme poverty in the future. This comes at a crucial moment, as the refugee crisis continues to grow in the world and climate change, conflict, and other shocks threaten to push hundreds of millions of people into extreme poverty.

“Self-sustaining solutions like DREAMS have never been more essential,” said Allison Huggins, Mercy Corps Deputy Regional Director for Africa. “As we look for solutions to address multiple forces—from climate change to the rise of violent extremist movements and globalization—rising global inequality will continue to play out in ways that profoundly impact the ability of poor households to sustainably escape from poverty.”

DREAMS for Refugees was a 2021 winner of the Larsen Lam ICONIQ Impact Award for Refugees managed by Lever for Change. DREAMS is funded by Conrad N. Hilton Foundation, ICONIQ Impact, IKEA Foundation, Sea Grape Foundation, and The Patchwork Collective.

“Having to flee, leaving behind your home, belongings, and sometimes your family members is incomprehensible for most of us,” said Annemieke de Jong, Head of Programmes, Refugee Livelihoods at the IKEA Foundation. “We firmly believe we can effectively invest in healing and building livelihoods through DREAMS so families can get back on their feet, doing what families should do best—be a loving and thriving place to be.”

“We are thrilled to see DREAMS recognized by Fast Company’s World Changing Ideas,” said Dianne Calvi, Chief Executive Officer of Village Enterprise. “In partnership with Mercy Corps, we’re looking for more foundations and individuals to join us so that DREAMS can reach even more vulnerable families and communities across Africa.”

About Village Enterprise

Village Enterprise’s mission is to end extreme poverty in rural Africa through entrepreneurship, innovation, and collective action. We work with vulnerable women, refugees, and youth who are most impacted by climate change, conflict, and displacement, and equip them with skills and resources to launch climate-smart businesses, build savings, and put themselves and their families onto a sustainable path out of extreme poverty. Village Enterprise has started over 74,000 businesses, trained over 264,000 first-time entrepreneurs, and positively transformed the lives of over 1,565,000 people in Uganda, Kenya, Rwanda, Ethiopia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Congo-Brazzaville, Mozambique, and Tanzania.

About Mercy Corps

Mercy Corps is a global team of nearly 6,000 humanitarians working to create a world where everyone can prosper. In more than 40 countries affected by crisis, disaster, poverty, and climate change we work alongside communities, local governments, forward-thinking corporations, and social entrepreneurs to meet urgent needs and develop long-term solutions to make lasting change possible. Mercy Corps has a total operating budget of over $550M and in 2022 reached over 38 million people.

Contact

Brett Slezak, Vice President of Marketing and Communications
bretts@villageenterprise.org   |   +1 (254) 541-7250

The post DREAMS for Refugees from Village Enterprise and Mercy Corps Wins Fast Company’s World Changing Ideas Award appeared first on Village Enterprise.

When violence and hunger force people to leave their homes in search of stability and safety, their skills travel with them. Refugees are more than the circumstances they find themselves in—they are people like anyone else with the determination to provide for their families and the power to strengthen local economies.

That’s why Mercy Corps and Village Enterprise are teaming up. Together, we combine two evidence-based approaches in a program called DREAMS (Delivering Resilient Enterprises and Market Systems). This innovative partnership provides comprehensive support for refugees and people with lower incomes on their journeys out of poverty and into business ownership.

Through this multi-phased program, DREAMS participants engage in workshops and training sessions with Village Enterprise, learning how to establish, promote, and expand a business. Then, Mercy Corps provides the support needed to help business owners find success—and help local economies flourish.

Mercy Corps helps by identifying profitable opportunities and connecting entrepreneurs to local markets, so their new businesses are better able to run more efficiently and expand.

In October, Mercy Corps CEO Tjada D’Oyen McKenna and a small group of Mercy Corps leaders and board members had the opportunity to visit the DREAMS program in Uganda, meet participants, and hear firsthand about the impact we are helping to spark.

Thanks to the tremendous support of the ICONIQ Impact community and other funders, we are building a foundation to prove the power of the DREAMS model in refugee camps—one of the world’s most challenging contexts—and to scale it to reach others living in extreme poverty. With its success, DREAMS brings the humanitarian and private sectors into lockstep to support millions of people globally in moving from survival mode to self-reliance.

The photos below celebrate the close of the first year of this transformational five-year program. Meet a few of the people taking part in our first cohort in Uganda and learn how DREAMS is a new model to create lasting change for communities around the world.

Laying the groundwork: A fund for entrepreneurs

In our first year of DREAMS, 1,200 households enrolled in the first cohort in Bidi Bidi, Uganda. In these Business Savings Groups, participants join roughly 30 other aspiring entrepreneurs from their community. Together, they grow their business skills and learn how to save and provide loans to each other—a network that is foundational to the success of the budding business owners.

In total, 40 groups have been established in the first year of the program. Festo (pictured above) serves as his group’s vice chairperson, helping to organize the group and track their assets. He’s also a business owner himself, having partnered with two of his fellow group members to start selling silver fish at the local market.

Ready, set, launch: New businesses take off

After 10 weeks of training from our DREAMS Business Mentors, the members of the savings groups have what they need to get their businesses off the ground. They know how to save and loan together, how to identify high-potential business opportunities, and how to operationalize a successful business.

To help entrepreneurs like Festo succeed, Mercy Corps conducted two market assessments to identify high-opportunity value chains and onboarded four private sector investors and distributors. In the coming months, we will connect DREAMS business owners directly with buyers and sellers to ensure their businesses have every chance to thrive into the future.

Festo and his silver fish business are just one story from the DREAMS program. Out of our first cohort, 400 businesses were launched with the support of ongoing mentorship and seed capital grants.

Okukuru: Raising chickens

At Bidi Bidi, Okukuru’s biggest concerns used to be feeding her children and paying their school fees. After joining her Business Savings Group in the local host community and receiving mentorship, her worries started to fade. Through DREAMS she and her group have been supported with poultry feed and Kuroiler chicks—an improved breed of scavenging chicken.

“This business has changed my life. I know how to manage the finances,” Okukuru says. With enough money to save and buy basic goods like saucepans and school uniforms for her children and sister, Okukuru recommends the DREAMS program to her friends and neighbors. “I encourage people to join savings groups and acquire knowledge from those groups.”

Juan Betty: Selling home goods

Another business owner, Juan Betty, is a refugee from South Sudan who works alongside her partners to sell basic home products in her community. She says the mentorship and support she’s received have changed her life for the better.

 

“The program has brought unity in our community, since we all work together as one.”

– Juan Betty, Bidi Bidi, Uganda

Juan Betty is not only the sole provider for her family, she also has a chronic illness. With her earnings, she can buy medicine for herself and everyone in her home can eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner. And if her business continues to grow, her group will receive additional financial support.

Rose: Growing sesame

Reflecting on her life in South Sudan, Rose says she was well off—a business owner who was forced to leave her home to keep her family safe from harm. Now, Rose is rebuilding her life with the help of her Business Savings Group.

When a DREAMS mentor suggested growing sesame as a good opportunity to build a business, she and her neighbor set to work on securing funding from their group and planting their crops. Rose looks forward to harvesting the three and a half acres of sesame, saying “The rains have been good, and we foresee a good reap. After this harvest, I don’t think I will be the same!”

A bold, new model for lasting change

The DREAMS program supports refugees and crisis-affected communities as they unlock their futures—improving their income and well-being significantly and sustainably. Connected to opportunity, funding, and skills, communities of people are better able to start businesses and power their local economies.

The design of the DREAMS program is a culmination of the partnership between Village Enterprise and Mercy Corps. Learn more about our pilot program through a story about Rashid, a Sudanese refugee living in Rhino Camp, Uganda, who attended one of our training sessions.

Our teams are committed to creating lasting, positive change for the world we share. Not only is DREAMS on course to assist thousands of people in Uganda and Ethiopia, but it forges a new path out of poverty that can be used again and again by local and international development agencies around the world.

DREAMS is a finalist for the Larsen Lam ICONIQ Impact Award. Learn more.

The post Year one of DREAMS: A new model for building opportunity appeared first on Village Enterprise.

Originally from Mugo village in South Sudan, Anna came to Bidi Bidi in 2018, fleeing the civil war in her home country. Like many of the 270,000 refugees living in Bidi Bidi, a lack of economic opportunities has meant that Anna and her family are largely dependent on humanitarian aid for food, education, and healthcare—programs that have seen significant cuts due to the pandemic. However, Anna was recently selected for DREAMS (Delivering Resilient Enterprises and Market Systems) for Refugees, and over the past few months, she’s started learning about running a business and being a part of a savings group. As a result, she’s feeling more hopeful about the future and her own ability to provide for her family.

“Having a successful business will be a blessing to me—I will be able to support myself and take my children to school,” Anna says. With the money earned from her business, Anna is planning to buy her children shoes, school materials, and medication that is not available at the settlement’s free clinic.

Anna, who is 27 years old, came to Uganda from South Sudan in 2018. Village Enterprise’s poverty graduation model has started more than 63,000 businesses in Africa and transformed the lives of nearly one million women and children living in extreme poverty.

A winner of the Larsen Lam ICONIQ Impact Award for refugees and funded by the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation and the IKEA Foundation, DREAMS for Refugees is an innovative program that merges Village Enterprise’s poverty graduation model with Mercy Corps’ expertise in market systems development in order to equip refugees with the skills, resources, and markets to start sustainable businesses and graduate from extreme poverty. Anna is part of the first cohort of DREAMS for Refugees as the program expands in Uganda, building off its successful pilot in 2018. In the months ahead, Anna will finish her business training, receive a seed capital grant from DREAMS to launch her business, and be mentored by a DREAMS staff member to help with the success of her business during its first year. Furthermore, DREAMS will connect Anna to private sector actors in her community that can both provide her with the high quality business inputs she needs and buy her produce.

“Anna will benefit further as DREAMS Market Systems Development approach facilitates the development and improved access to markets, goods, and services to propel her business,” says Dulane Omer, Program Manager, Ethiopia at Mercy Corps. “The market linkages will ensure Anna has access to quality products and services from private sector actors and that her new business flourishes with new clients.”

“What’s unique about DREAMS for Refugees is that it isn’t a short-term solution,” says Dianne Calvi, CEO and President of Village Enterprise. “Support for refugees often focuses on immediate needs, such as providing shelter or food assistance. While that approach is extremely important, our aim is to equip refugees with the tools and resources so they can launch their own sustainable businesses, earn higher incomes for themselves and their families, build assets, savings and resilience, and ultimately live happier and healthier lives.”

On top of expanding in Uganda, DREAMS for Refugees will launch in Ethiopia later this year. In total, DREAMS will reach more than 33,000 households across the two countries and impact more than 200,000 lives. Just as importantly, its impact will be studied in an independent randomized controlled trial (RCT) conducted by IDinsight, providing valuable research that can be used across the international development and humanitarian aid sectors to better serve refugees in the future.

Rashid, an entrepreneur from the DREAMS for Refugees pilot in Uganda, stands next to the new home he built with savings from his business. Read Rashid’s story here.

“By generating evidence within refugee communities, we can help ensure that investments lead to meaningful benefits that help refugees improve their lives,” says Alison Connor, Director II at IDinsight. “The evidence collected in this project will help us understand how to meet their unique needs and challenges. IDinsight is excited to evaluate this innovative program.”

All of this comes at a crucial moment for Africa. The Norwegian Refugee Council recently published its annual list of the world’s ten most neglected displacement crises, and for the first time ever, all ten were in Africa. On top of this, the ongoing drought in East Africa and rising prices due to the war in Ukraine has caused 23 million people to experience extreme hunger and threatens to push millions of families into extreme poverty. These crises have been rarely featured in the media and are significantly underfunded. As displacement grows in the region due to these shocks, so does the need to better serve refugees and help them create a sustainable path forward.

In order to meet this need, Village Enterprise and Mercy Corps are currently working to expand DREAMS for Refugees into Kenya, and there have already been discussions with the Kenyan government about what the program would look like. Village Enterprise is currently looking for donors to support this $10M expansion that would reach an additional 33,000 households and impact the lives of more than 200,000 people. This way, the program can reach more people like Anna, ensuring more parents and families have the opportunity to make their dreams a reality.

To learn more about DREAMS and our entrepreneurs, read Rashid’s story from the program’s pilot in Uganda here and watch a video featuring Joyce’s story here.

The post DREAMS on World Refugee Day appeared first on Village Enterprise.

Before the war, Rashid had a prosperous life in South Sudan—he grew food on his own plot of land and also ran a small shop that brought in enough income to support his growing family (he and his wife have six children ranging in age from 6 to 20). But when the civil war that displaced more than two million people across his country came too close to home, Rashid and his family had to leave everything they had behind. With violence encroaching on their small village, they fled carrying just a few personal belongings—clothes, bedsheets, and some food. The family ultimately arrived at Rhino Camp, a refugee settlement in northwestern Uganda, in 2017. And while they were eager to put down new roots, their struggles were unfortunately far from over.

Uganda hosts Africa’s largest refugee population. With limited resources, basic necessities like food and clean drinking water are out of reach for far too many people here, Ugandans and refugees alike. While those who make it to Rhino Camp may have a home, building a life is a more daunting challenge.

When they first arrived, Rashid and his family lived in a grass-thatched home, which was immensely difficult during the rainy season, when water poured right in. He was frustrated that his children were unable to make much progress in their very overcrowded schools; the whole family dealt with sickness and getting enough to eat. He used the little money he had from South Sudan to open a small shop selling beans and maize, but did not have enough capital to sustain the business. Like so many refugees, Rashid and his family were at first largely dependent on food assistance from humanitarian organizations. While this crucial aid is often lifesaving in the short term, Rashid wanted a sustainable solution that would allow him and his family to put their skills to work and provide for themselves, rather than remain dependent on assistance that might not always be there.

Rashid took a major step in this direction when he was selected to join a business training program run by Village Enterprise. The training helped Rashid develop skills in money management and savings, and concluded with a grant to help him sustain his own small business, including buying new goods and supplies. Identifying a need in the community for hardware, he started selling nails and other materials people needed to build and repair their homes. Since then, he’s not only been able to keep the business going, but has earned enough money to build a new, more sustainable home for his own family, and to send his children to low-cost private schools at the camp, where he is now pleased with the progress they are making in their education.

A new kind of humanitarian partnership

The training Rashid attended was part of a pilot between Village Enterprise and Mercy Corps that tested whether combining our two organizations’ skills and experiences could help us reach more people and secure longer-lasting outcomes.

The Delivering Resilient Enterprises and Market Systems (DREAMS) for Refugees program brings together two evidence-based models: Village Enterprise’s focus on poverty graduation (lifting people out of poverty) and Mercy Corps’ expertise in market systems development—identifying profitable, sustainable avenues for refugees to build economic self-sufficiency.

Village Enterprise’s poverty graduation approach serves the most vulnerable refugees, helping them build a base level of income by providing training, mentoring, seed capital grants, and savings groups such as the one Rashid participated in. Through this method, we engage some of the hardest-to-reach people, those even other humanitarian groups on the ground often don’t serve.

Meanwhile, Mercy Corps’ market systems development approach focuses on the next step: they work with the private sector to understand the needs of refugees and identify opportunities for them to build and grow their own businesses. Mercy Corps connects refugees to the market-based services necessary to help their businesses thrive, including fostering connections to suppliers and buyers to help them get the goods they need, as well as creating connections to financial services and access to land.

Each of these approaches has helped lift many refugees out of poverty, but neither can reach all refugees. The poverty graduation model is proven to support people in escaping extreme poverty, but without access to strong and inclusive markets, there is the question of how graduates can grow beyond their initial micro-enterprises. Conversely, the market systems development model has been shown to increase income and strengthen the livelihoods of refugees, but it cannot always reach those who do not yet have enough income and resources to consider starting a business. So we hypothesized that our approaches would be even more effective when combined.

With the DREAMS program, we combine these two approaches, first helping refugees graduate out of poverty through a sequenced set of activities designed to launch and sustain their microenterprises, then supporting them to scale those businesses by connecting them to dynamic markets, while further integrating them into their host communities. This integrated approach helps ensure that they not only have the chance to get ahead but also the financial security to avoid slipping back into poverty.

The next level

That initial iteration of DREAMS took place in the refugee settlement where Rashid lives, as well as two other settlements in Uganda. Now we’re planning to take this to the next level, expanding the program in Uganda and also bringing this solution to Ethiopia, another country with a large refugee population. DREAMS will help transform thousands of lives among the more than two million refugees who live in these two countries – especially women, youth,and others living in extreme poverty.

Why hasn’t this type of partnership happened before? The truth is, current humanitarian models and approaches aren’t really designed for the full scope of challenges that these refugee populations face. Refugee responses are typically short term, providing much-needed, but limited assistance such as emergency food or cash. Conversely, job training programs often focus on providing basic skills to small groups of people and are not necessarily aligned with local market needs. What we are doing now, by connecting each of our organizations, is building a more holistic, systemic model that is adapted to the realitiesof refugees living in long-term displacement.

This new phase of the program is designed to reach 30,000 households across Uganda and Ethiopia, impacting more than 150,000 lives. Crucially, working together leverages our two organizations’ strengths and areas of expertise to help us reach more people with more support. We don’t need to become jacks-of-all-trades if we can work together in ways that play to our strengths. Covid‑19 has only upped the urgency for these types of partnerships. Millions more people are facing humanitarian crisis situations due to the pandemic, and they need solutions that will help them survive immediately and support them in building economic self-sufficiency.

Our commitment to invest in and scale up a series of breakthrough solutions

The rising popularity of big bet philanthropy—investments of $10 million or more in ideas meant to create transformative solutions to deep-seated social problems—is largely a response to a recognized need to connect the dots between the ideas needed to solve these big challenges, and the investment needed to make those ideas a reality. By bringing our two groups’ combined decades of experience together to provide holistic long-term solutions, DREAMS represents a totally new model of approaching global poverty. Not only is this program on course to assist many thousands of people, but this successful evidence-based model can be replicated by other humanitarian groups around the world.

With this in mind, we’re extremely honored that Village Enterprise, Mercy Corps, and IDinsight (a global advisory, data analytics,and research organization that serves as the external evaluator for this program) have been named one of five finalists for the Larsen Lam ICONIQ Impact Award. This brand new initiative was launched in January 2020 by philanthropists Chris Larsen and Lyna Lam, and the Sea Grape Foundation, with support from ICONIQ Impact and Lever for Change, to identify actionable ideas that will transform the lives of refugees and displaced people. In addition to the opportunity to compete for the $12 million prize, finalists also will receive technical support and expertise from the Bridgespan Group and Lever for Change.

We’re excited to take the lessons learned from this successful pilot and scale up in a big way. By combining the expertise of our two organizations, we have unlocked a new and exciting model that has the potential to transform millions of lives. It’s a sustainable solution that will help refugees around the world to use their skills, follow their ambitions, and build their own dreams.

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