It Takes A Village — Why the ecosystem-based approach is necessary for creating remote employment opportunities for refugee workforce

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In traditional business parlance, an ecosystem is an orchestrated network spanning multiple sectors. The firms involved work to shared standards, sometimes on a shared platform, to make their products and services compatible. They create links among themselves that amplify the impact of their individual enterprises beyond what it would have been in the absence of strategic collaboration as a part of an ecosystem. Due to the inherent structural changes in geopolitics and the economy, it is highly unlikely that a single participant in an ecosystem is going to be able to offer all elements of the ever-changing customer or user needs. By coming together as an ecosystem, individual firms can leverage one another’s strengths to provide holistic solutions for their customers and users, and also to experiment with and innovate solutions.

Within the impact investing sector, there are many examples of the efficacy of the ecosystem-based approach for effecting systems-level change. Likewise, creating an environment that supports greater remote employment opportunities for the refugee workforce would also require an ecosystem-based, coordinated intervention at multiple touchpoints. It is unlikely that any single class of participants in the remote refugee employment ecosystem can bring about lasting and sustainable positive change by itself. Before diving into why a collaborative work environment is important for a prosperous future for all stakeholders, it is worth mapping-out the remote refugee employment value chain.

Refugee Employment Ecosystem | © 2020 Apoorv Karmakar All Rights Reserved

Notwithstanding which entry point one chooses, the inter-dependencies among the different participants in this ecosystem is hard to miss. Let us break down the dependencies in greater detail

Employers:

Value add:

1. Refugees — providing employment and an opportunity to earn a livelihood.

Dependencies:

1. FoW Startups — to provide tools and solutions necessary to enable them to hire remote refugee workforce.
2. Refugee Support Organizations — for access to highly-skilled and job-ready remote refugee workforce.

Future of Work Startups:

Value add:

1. Employers — building products and solutions that enable more and more employers to hire distributed teams comprising of remote refugee workforce.

Dependencies:

1. Refugees — to understand customer pain-points, test usability, better integrate design-thinking into product development.
2. Employers — while the refugee workforce is the user, the customer for the future of work startups are employers who hire such a workforce. Customers are the sine qua non for any business, thus being able to connect with as many potential customers as possible would be critical to venture success.
3. Investors — to provide capital for developing, building, and launching their products in the market and then scaling.

Refugee Support Organizations:

Value add:

1. Refugees — Provide skill training for refugees to enable them to capitalize on remote employment opportunities.
2. Employers — Create a pipeline of highly-skilled, trained, and job-ready workforce for employers.

Dependencies:

1. Employers — Understanding the changing needs of remote employers ie. What skills are in-demand, what areas, if any, the remote refugee workforce is falling short of expectations, etc.
2. FoW Startups — Perspectives on the predicted future trends in technology (specifically enterprise application) that they can incorporate in their curriculums to prepare future-ready refugee workforce.

In an ecosystem, success is as much about helping other firms maximize their potential as it is about individual success. The concept of shared or collective success is central to the ecosystem model. The positive outcome of an individual effort of any single participant above would be hard to sustain if not backed by a collaborative work environment, vital to scaling singular efforts.

To ensure long-term success, a coordinated ecosystem-based approach is necessary given the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

Amplio Ventures’ Refugee Employment Venture Fund (REVF) is on a mission to grow and expand the remote employment opportunities for the thousands of refugees across the globe by investing in pre-seed and seed-stage future of work enterprises. In a previous Medium post, I shared how AmplioVentures structured our investment thesis in service of our mission. This thesis is heavily informed by our three-pronged impact philosophy:

1. Creating remote employment opportunities for refugees within REVF’s investment portfolio.
2. Investing in solutions that create an enabling environment for greater employment of remote refugee workforce.
3. Engaging in field-building by helping with upskilling, talent matching, cross-sharing of opportunities, and learnings with our vast network of organizations committed to supporting refugees and displaced migrants.

Our work as venture investors is the mere proverbial tip of the iceberg of the value we hope to create for displaced people. As an active participant in the above ecosystem, Amplio Ventures will assume the following roles –

1. Venture Investment — we will provide seed capital to the most tenacious, driven, and innovative entrepreneurs, creating an enabling environment for distributed teams, solving the challenges faced by refugees in accessing remote employment opportunities.
2. Venture Support — leveraging the 14+ years of refugee employment experience on our team, we will help connect our portfolio companies with potential customers looking to scale.
3. Refugee job creation — encourage our portfolio companies to hire from within the remote refugee talent pool, and encourage others to do the same.
4. Access to talent — we have a growing network of refugee support organizations that we will leverage, creating access to a skilled and cost-effective talent pipeline for portfolio companies.
5. Connector — help create a feedback loop among employers, startups, and refugee support organizations to inform product, training, hiring strategies.
6. Education — educating potential employers on the benefits of hiring from refugee communities

There is massive potential — largely untapped — for mutually beneficial synergies within the ecosystem approach to creating remote refugee employment opportunities. This potential has been recognized in many fields where these synergies are leading to novel approaches and solutions. It is particularly evident that the challenges of sustainability and scalability call for a wide collaboration, as the required changes and adjustments exceed the capacity and capability of individual actors. Concepts, methods and tools developed for certain sectors can facilitate the engagement and in turn the interplay of an ecosystem approach that will increase remote work opportunities. Investing in opportunities for the refugee workforce will not only help businesses sustain scalability, but also provide refugees with access to financial services, critical skills, and other benefits simply by securing more opportunities for this group.

At Amplio Ventures, we believe “it takes a village” to achieve the systems-level change that we are fostering. Consequently, our strategy is grounded in an ecosystem-based approach, where we partner in meaningful and valuable ways with other organizations committed to better outcomes for refugee communities.

If you are a seed-stage entrepreneur building a future-of-work solution beneficial to the remote refugee workforce, we want to hear from you. Reach out to me via email, Twitter, or LinkedIn.