1,000 Jobs in 1,000 Days: Empowering Refugee Entrepreneurs to Thrive
There are 43.7 million refugees in the world, according to UNHCR.
293,000+ live in Kukuma refugee camp in Kenya, which has been in operation for 32 years.
Michael Linton with Maak Impact is working to help people there to start and grow businesses to provide jobs and opportunities. Refugee entrepreneurs are remarkably innovative, resourceful, and reliable – they have seen a 97% micro-loan repayment rate.
Their goal? To create 1,000 jobs in the next 1,000 days.
Fund an entrepreneur project and or find out more at https://maakimpact.org/
Podcast Transcript
Jacob: [00:00:00] Welcome to Impact Stories. I’m here with Mike Linton. Please introduce yourself.
Mike: I’m Mike Linton. I’m the chairman of the board for MAAK Impact.
Jacob: Tell me about the good that you’re trying to do in the world.
Mike: Our focus is on the refugee camp in northwestern Kenya called Kakuma. It has 293,000 refugees and our focus is helping them create businesses and employ more people. So we want to create jobs. There’s a lot of education there. Our goal is to create jobs by investing in the businesses and helping them be self sustainable.
Jacob: Can you give me an example of how that works?
Mike: Yeah. About a year ago, we met some refugees from Kakuma. I didn’t know that Kakuma had been there for 32 years. It’s the third largest refugee camp in the world. So we met a few refugees that had grown up there that had been displaced from other countries.
And we decided to put out applications of people that wanted to start businesses or grow their businesses. And within a week, we had 50 to a hundred applications. We vet out the [00:01:00] applications of who has a business that could be successful or that will improve their life. And so we funded those businesses and it doesn’t take a lot of money to fund one or two businesses there.
With a donation of five hundred dollars, we supported DeSabe’s chicken farm. She could go buy seventy chickens and then she sells all the eggs every day. And she goes from having only ten dollars a month to live on that they give every refugee, to being able to make fifty dollars or a hundred dollars a month. So that is then sustainable. She can grow her chicken farm. She can support her daughter. Those are the types of impacts that we’re making.
Jacob: Tell me about the moment in your career when you decided you wanted to shift towards making a difference.
Mike: I think we always start our career saying, Hey, I want to make a difference. I’ve always wanted to know, how can I make a difference? I had an experience a year and a half ago when I met some refugees that were from the Kakuma refugee camp. They told me, this is how our situation is. We live off [00:02:00] ten dollars a month. There’s not enough food. We have a lot of education, there’s a lot of certificates we can get, a lot of programs, but there’s no jobs that we can have. And I just look at how fortunate we are to live and I compared that to what was being described to me by these people and it just touched my heart. And I said, Hey, I’m going to do what I can to make a difference. I got with another business executive and said, Hey, what can we do to make an impact? And he had started MAAK Impact several years before and we decided, okay, if we shift that impact to Kakuma where there’s enough of an infrastructure, but also a huge need, then we can make a really big impact. So I decided this is where my dollar can make a big difference in their life. And I just did the economics of, okay, a dollar spent helping one place versus helping in the refugee camp, it just seemed like it went farther and made a bigger impact.
Jacob: Help me understand too, the unique challenges of a refugee camp and this refugee [00:03:00] camp in particular.
Mike: Yeah, just to describe it, about a hundred new people come into the reception centers every day in Kakuma, and they’ve been forcibly displaced, meaning it’s not safe in their country. There’s war, they’ve seen horrific things already, and they’re coming in as children, as families. They come into the refugee camp to seek refuge. They are put in a reception center that is overcrowded. They live in tents or in huge warehouse buildings separated by plastic walls that are in really bad condition. And so then after they spend three to nine months in the reception center they are placed in a plot of land that has a tent and or a steel wall with trees. You see them cooking over coal.
They are given a distribution of food at the beginning of the month, it usually lasts a couple weeks. They don’t have enough food. They don’t have clean living conditions on their dirt floors. I just went there two weeks ago and I saw an adobe bed [00:04:00] that just had some magazines or some paper on them, right? What are those for? They’re to act as a mattress and it just hits me like I have no idea how they’re living or how difficult it is.
And they go and fetch water every day from what the UN brings. The UN is providing for them, and the UN gets their donations to provide the food and the shelter. The interesting thing about Kakuma and the refugee camp, is that there is a lot of entrepreneurship, a lot of hope. They’ve come from places where they have skills, where they’ve lived a life as professionals or doing other things. And so they have this desire and we’ve seen that when they’ve been given a little bit of capital, they make the most of it. They turn that into a sustainable business.
One of the shocking things to me going there was to see that there is a makeshift economy and they are figuring out how to do services for each other. There’s enough of an economy that they can be sustained, but they get a lot of eggs [00:05:00] and other supplies from outside of the camp. And so when we help them start a chicken farm I kept asking, well, if you had another 100 chickens, could you sell them all? And she’d say, yes. Could you sell all the eggs? Yes. If you had 1000 chickens, could you sell all the eggs? Yes. I finally say, how is that possible? Because I think of it different. There’s not enough demand for certain things here. She says, well, all of our eggs right now are coming from hundreds of kilometers away. I know I could sell these as long as I had the chicken capacity.
There’s a lot of impact that we can have through sharing and giving grants and giving very low interest loans to these
refugees that have had businesses.
Jacob: Maybe explain how it works in really simple terms.
Mike: MAAK Impact is given and I even give my donation to MAAK Impact. I earmark it towards Dusabe’s chicken farm. Then we have a director who’s a refugee in the Kakuma refugee camp. He runs a business. We give him the money and then he [00:06:00] gives it directly to Dusabe. She goes and buys the chicken fence and she buys the chicken coop and then she goes and buys the chickens and then she reports all of her finances back to MAAK Impact, our director. And then we go and get the loan repayment every couple weeks,
Jacob: So it is a loan. They repay no interest, low interest, or how’s that structured?
Mike: We’ve done all three ways. We’ve given grants and those have worked well. And then we said it’s better for them if we give no interest loans. So up to this point, it’s just been granted a no interest loan. And then because of all the loan repayments like 97 percent are coming back, we want to have a small interest, very low interest rate to then fund other entrepreneurs that are there.
Jacob: The funds that you are deploying, where are they coming from right now?
Mike: We have a few business owners that have decided that, Hey, this is where I want to put my funding. And so if this resonates with them, if they are interested in helping the refugees, here’s a way that they can directly impact the [00:07:00] refugees. So we have a few donors that we’ve gotten money from.
Jacob: What’s your vision for MAAK Impact and what it can do?
Mike: So we’ve created a school called the Entrepreneurship Tech Center and it helps these people run their business once they apply for funding. They go through a six week course and we’ve started to see the impact of those courses where they learn entrepreneurship skills. They learn how to keep their personal finances from their business finances.
These are very small businesses. They get a small funding to work on their businesses. They repay that loan. They apply for a five hundred dollar loan. They hit those milestones and then we give them that. And really we want to build an entrepreneurship tech center that is self-sustaining from the loan repayments and also that is continually helping educate people in how to do business better and how to employ people.
Our goal is to create a thousand jobs in the next thousand days. And we, in a short time, about six months of doing this, we’ve created about 70 jobs, all different types of things there. We have a lot of different [00:08:00] programs. Entrepreneurship Tech Center is one of them. Funding these individual businesses is one of the things that we are doing. But we also have started some businesses where we have Kakuma Co. They’re making a backpack or they’re making a shoulder strap bag or a water bottle holder and they are manufacturing them out of Kakuma refugee camp and we’re selling them in the United States and that’s another way we’ve been able to make an impact.
Jacob: If I were a potential donor, there’s no shortage of options of where I could put my money to make a difference. As you approach people, what do you say in terms of like why their dollars should go to Kukuma?
Mike: Yeah. So the dollar spent on helping somebody create a sustainable business is a dollar that’s giving them a hand up instead of a handout. They’ve been given handouts for 32 years and their situation hasn’t improved a ton. I believe my dollar given to Dusabe and her having a chicken farm or Alleen and her sewing shop that they are now able to support themselves. And [00:09:00] they can buy more of the things, they can employ other people. To me, that is a big sustainable impact that just keeps growing that economy. Even buying things from Kakuma Co, we’re helping 20 artisans grow their business, grow their income, getting money into the camp so that they can then have a better economy. To me, that is sustainable hope as opposed to something that we’ll have to keep giving that isn’t helping them create a way better lifestyle for themselves. And they are more self reliant, and that gives them more dignity and more opportunity to take care of themselves.
Jacob: What is it that you’re most looking for right now?
Mike: People to look at the MAAK Impact website. We put all the businesses that need funding on there and we want people to go to maakimpact.org, M A A K impact dot org, and to fund one of the businesses. We met a lady, Fabiola, that is asking for twelve hundred dollars so she can buy a grinder to grind up all the seeds and to make porridge that she’s then selling to people to have more [00:10:00] nutrition. Us funding that will help out so many people and so we’re looking for funding of any one of those businesses or of the ETC school where you can fund two hundred dollars per student for the six week course.
And then also we have Kakuma glasses where there are five dollar glasses that you can give somebody sight. And so funding a pair of glasses. And then we have an agreement. If whoever gives the glasses, one thing I wanted to know as a donor, who am I helping? And so we’ve created a way of giving that feedback loop of We had a couple to Nima’s business. She has a soap making business.
And then a week later, two weeks later, after she had grown her business, she jumped on the call with the donors. And so there is this personalized touch of like, who am I helping? And the same thing with Kakuma glasses. When somebody donates a pair of glasses, there’s a thank you picture and note to the people that donated. And so for me, that’s important that the donors know who they’re [00:11:00] helping and that the people being helped can give that thanks to those that are providing that service, whether it’s funding the business, funding the school and or funding somebody that needs glasses.
Jacob: If someone was interested in learning more, what are the best resources to point them to?
Mike: So to our website, MAAKimpact.org would be the best way to learn about it or to talk to me and to talk to our director, Devin, that would be the best way
Jacob: Are there any common misconceptions people tend to have that you feel strongly that you need to dispel or educate them on?
Mike: The dollar going to a refugee business in the Kakuma refugee camp, the impact that dollar does, is exponentially more than many other causes that I’ve given money to .
For me, when I look at the best way to make a big impact, it is to help people help themselves. And I believe just giving them money is not the best way. Giving them money to do a business and to help them be self sustainable is the best way. And that’s the best way I believe [00:12:00] entrepreneurship and starting businesses and doing that is impactful and very helpful.
Jacob: What else do you want to share before I let you go?
Mike: The last thing I’d like to say is thank you. Thanks for taking the time. Thanks for talking to me. And it helps me understand what we can talk about to be more impactful.
This is a new nonprofit endeavor for me. And so I just appreciate you listening, taking the time and kind of coaching me on how to talk to people. So thank you deeply.
Jacob: Thanks for the good that you’re doing and keep up the good work.
Mike: Appreciate it.
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