Migration

Taklit is an African Refugee from Eritrea who arrived in Israel in 2009. He came with no money and only spoke Tigrinia (Eritrean language).

Talklit heard about Microfy's busines course through ARDC (The African Refugee Development Center) which is Microfy’s main field partner and decided to join it. Microfy advised Taklit to attend ARDC’s English classes before starting the business coures.

After completing the language class, Taklit joined the business course along with 12 other Refugees where he learned the following topics:

- Business plan development
- How to start a business
- Management
- Bookkeeping
- Marketing

Together with Talklit's little money saved from working as a cleaner and a small loan provided by Microfy, Talklit successfully set up an Internet café. The loan conditions were the following:

- Loan amount: NIS 5,000 ($1,200)
- Loan period: 6 months (monthly repayments)
- Annual Interest Rate: 10% ($60)

Microfy provided Taklit with a mentor (Noam, a employee from CitiBank) who was in touch with him twice a month to follow his progress and he informed us when Taklit was in need of business consultancy, legal advice or further financial assistance.
Upon the repayment of his first loan, Taklit requested a second loan for the amount of NIS 10,000 ($2,500) for one year to help him hire additional staff.

As a consequence of our solution, British Columbians will have a realistic understanding of the immigrant community. All British Columbians can benefit from this knowledge by coming together, which can lead to greater contributions to the province economically and socially. The primary activities involved with our solution are to conduct video interviews in communities across British Columbia and ask the general population what they believe to be true about immigrants. Then after carrying out these video interviews with the general population, we will conduct video interviews with members of the immigrant communities across BC, to ask if these beliefs are true and obtain their responses. Once we have both sets of video interviews done we will post the interviews to our website. We will also contact media across British Columbia about our project and share the results of our video interviews. With both sides of the video interviews complete and the media involvement we can create a discussion across British Columbia which will encourage a better understanding between the general population and immigrant communities. Thus, resulting in a province which comes together economically and socially.

aidha’s program is divided into 2 modules of 9 months each.
In Module 1, students attend a Compass Club where they learn to budget and save through the support of their peers and their mentor. They also attend a Leadership Club, where they learn communication and management skills in an hands-on approach: e.g. in every session, students stand up in front of the class to give a speech on management topics (think Toastmasters). The computer workshops complete the curriculum. Students cover the basics of Microsoft Office and the internet but also more advanced topics such as creating databases and designing sales material. In Module 2, students participate in an Advanced Leadership Club where they explore business topics in depth and develop their communications skills further. They also join a Venture Club, where they learn how to start and manage a business, including pricing and competition analysis, and create a viable business plan at the end of the course.
Lisa, a Filipino national, had been working very hard for many years in Singapore as a domestic worker but had no savings when she joined aidha. When she completed our programme, she had built up enough savings to buy a cow back home. She continued to save and later bought a plot of land and has now set up a farm which employs 16 members of her family.

aidha women who had worked for years and amassed no savings, are now the proud owners of cafés back home. They have cows and land, clean water, new homes and vehicles. Their children are productive in school. And they have pride and a sense of accomplishment.

We will identify sustainable productive projects developed by recent college graduates (or last year college students) of the Decentralized Institutes of Technology of the state of Zacatecas. The projects can be developed by a 3 to 5 member teams and they have to have a description of the project and a draft of a business plan.

Once a project is identified we will connect the team with a business incubator (ideally from the Autonomous University of Zacatecas or the Monterrey Institute of Technology) so the business plan will be refined and other considerations will be taken into account. At the same time our nonprofit in Houston will raise the startup funds -within the Mexican community- needed the fund the project.

The startup funds will take the form of loans and will range from $1,000 to $10,000 USD and will be paid back by the applicant team in terms of 1 to 5 years. We will try to have the loans managed by an established financial institution member of AMUCSS, which is a civil association that groups rural financial institutions, rural micro banks, rural savings cooperatives and other like institutions.

While the business incubator will help the team during the start-up process, we will recruit participants of the program to become mentors for new generations of entrepreneurs.

aidha’s program is divided into 2 modules of 9 months each.

In Module 1, students attend a Compass Club where they learn to budget and save through the support of their peers and their mentor. They also attend a Leadership Club, where they learn communication and management skills in an hands-on approach: for e.g. in every session, students stand up in front of the class to give a speech on management topics. The computer workshops, held in groups of only 5 students, complete the module 1 curriculum. Students have their own laptop during the class and cover the basics of Microsoft Office and the internet but also more advanced topics such as creating databases and designing sales material.

In Module 2, students participate in an Advanced Leadership Club where they explore business topics in depth and develop their communications skills further. They also join a Venture Club, where they learn how to start and manage a business, including pricing and competition analysis, and create a viable business plan at the end of the course.

Lisa, a Filipino national, had been working very hard for many years in Singapore as a domestic worker but had no savings when she joined aidha. When she completed our programme, she had built up enough savings to buy a cow back home. She continued to save and later bought back the land her family once owned when she was young. She has now set up a farm on the land which employs 16 members of her family.

We have learned several things through this Project. On the one hand, the project brought a change of attitude, since students were able to see that their way of life and culture does not necessarily needs to be imitated; they were able to realize that they were lucky to live in the “rich” side and that this does not mean they are superior; students became aware of their prejudice, they have learned to work as a team and see reality differently.
On the other hand, our students became aware of the creative ideas they can develop to devote themselves to others and to transform the world we live in through the different initiatives proposed. Some of them are listed below:
- creating an orchestra composed by individuals from different countries and our school’s volunteers in order to perform in nearby retirement homes.
- meeting the different migrants in the school’s environment. Several workshops can then be created (cooking, folk dance, clothing, languages, etc.) where we could all learn from each other.
- training – help for migrants: students at school can help migrants who have recently arrived to the city to learn the local language, and they can also – through their testimony, help change the way young people see them so that we can all live in a more inclusive society.

EMPATHY teaches international relations & fosters cross-cultural understanding through video conferencing between rural U.S. children & displaced Afghans. Without EMPATHY, Afghan children may develop misconceptions about Americans due to their experience with war & displacement, triggering animosity & even extremism. Rural American children may develop misconceptions of the world & not understand the reality faced by children in countries at war.

EMPATHY students experience the world beyond familiar borders & develop new understandings of each other. Afghan children interact with Americans their age not linked with the Afghan conflict. American children see the effects of war & poverty. This exposure helps children learn firsthand the world’s realities, begin to eradicate misconceptions, & advocate for justice.

This is accomplished through varied means.
All students:
- online classes (international relations, politics, history & geography & influence of culture on our understanding of each);
- courses on effective cross-cultural communication & basic Farsi/English;
- media material to share experience widely.

U.S.:
- humanitarian service, identifying & responding to IDP needs;
- volunteer travel (safe developing country) to assist displaced communities;
- “Buddy” program to connect U.S. students with locally resettled refugees & aid in their adaptation.

Afghanistan:
- intensive ESL & computer courses to gain skills comparable to global peers.

Sociologists and psychologists say that a positive opinion about a person or group produces a positive attitude and behavior toward them. The idea is that students participating in the workshop can intervene at any stage of the communication process to disseminate information and content free of prejudices and social stereotypes on topics that interest them actively.
The purpose of this project is that participants in the workshop use for our purpose a horizontal communication model, which is characteristic of citizen or participatory journalism.
In this sense, social networking sites, because of their characteristics (access, usability and transcendence) are particularly suitable for students of Secondary Education to perfectly implement this participatory communication scheme.

Mr. Adams , born in pre-Partition India and now living in Australia, contacted us after watching the video of Major Singh, one of the first from our collection to be posted online. Major Singh describes how in 1947 he witnessed a train to Pakistan get derailed by a mob at the Amritsar city train station. He describes the British guards on the train being fatally attacked by a hand grenade at which point the mob swarmed the train. Sixty-four years later and thousands of miles away, Mr. Adams watched as Major Singh described this scene and was able to make a personal connection: one of the train guards was his cousin, Lt. Reid.

This intersection of Major Singh’s and Mr. Adam's life history is one small example of the potential for human connection possible within a democratic approach to collecting oral histories. The interactive experience of collecting and preserving history strengthens the voices of survivors, forging connections over thousands of miles and years of history.

Such interactions and connections are made possible by the following process:

1- Live workshops are broadcast online to train citizens across the world in interviewing survivors within their communities. Self-paced online training videos will soon replace monthly workshops.

2- The interviews cover pre-Partition life and culture, eye-witness accounts of Partition and post-Partition resettlement.

3- Submitted stories are reviewed to ensure ethical standards developed by expert oral historians.

4- Approved videos are embedded on an interactive map of South Asia on our website.

200 mots ou moins.L'utiilsation de la technologie permettra à mon blog qui est lu de par le monde d'alerter l'opinion sur le calvaire des demandeurs d'asile un peu part partout dans les coins les plus isolés de la planéte.
Aujourd'hui, avec l'outil avec les nouvelles technologies de l'information, on peut toucher et sensibiliser le public et attirer son attention sur une situation donnée.

A Tekoha cria canais de comercialização para comunidades de baixa renda e comercializa seus produtos e serviços de forma estratégica. Comercializamos produtos comunitários como brindes corporativos sustentáveis. Trabalhamos com uma rede de mais de 140 comunidades. Dessa forma ampliamos a escala de nosso impacto social e geramos uma operação comercial sustentável capaz de ser autofinanciada e com grande potencial de ampliação de impacto social por meio da geração de renda. Possuímos uma grande carteira de clientes (Natura, Pão de Açúcar, HSBC, Santander, entre outros) que nos permite gerar demandas para as comunidades ao longo do ano. O desafio da Tekoha é “traduzir” as linguagens das comunidades e das empresas para viabilizar transações que sejam benéficas para ambas as partes e que, acima de tudo, gerem renda nas comunidades valorizando a cultura local. Essas atividades permitem que comunidades antes excluídas do mercado passem a integrá-lo e gerarem um volume de renda significativo para contribuir no seu processo de transformação socioeconômica.

LaborVoices (LV) crowdsources worker opinions by connecting mobile workers via an easily scalable and highly replicable voice and SMS platform. We bring transparency to labor networks and provide brands with a real-time supply chain monitoring tool.
LV piloted its innovative mobile technology in September 2010, in Bangalore, India. LV’s model includes partnering with local non-governmental organizations (NGOs) already active in the community and engaged with migrant workers. Using the partner NGO’s trust as the basis of our relationship, we recruit workers to share their opinions and their questions regarding potential work opportunities in different locations. We aggregate the data from workers at a current work site and provide answers to those looking for new opportunities. In this way, LV promotes transparency in labor markets allowing migrant workers to fact-check prospective employers and employment conditions by accessing the LV mobile phone portal.  The LV system will allow workers to search and retrieve relevant information through the simplest mobile phones.
We aggregate the data that workers give us into intelligence products that we sell to supply-chain managers, during an embargo period. After our embargo, we publish our data and intelligence, to hold ourselves, and everyone else, accountable.

1.Identification and organizing of women clients and their families

This will be done through active referrals from Batis partners in countries of destination, as well as from institutional partners and area-based partners and from families of migrant workers themselves in the provinces of Bulacan, Nueva Ecija and Ilocos Sur in the island of Luzon.

2.Addressing psycho-social concerns of distressed women migrant workers

Batis will utilize the case management protocol that it has developed to extend assistance to returned distressed women migrant workers as we journey with them from a state of victimization and failure to a place of rebuilding, transformation and empowerment.

3.Capacity building through life-skills and capacity-building trainings on entrepreneurship and enterprise development.

To help the women in rebuilding their dreams and their lives, Batis will conduct continuing life-skills training to provide the women with tools to make positive changes in their lives happen. Batis will follow this up with capacity-building trainings and mentoring on entrepreneurship and enterprise development.

4.Social and economic empowerment through entrepreneurship and enterprise development.

Batis will guide and mentor the women clients and their families in setting up enterprises that are linked with industries or existing economic initiatives of successful migrants.

5. Local multi-stakeholder mobilization, linkage building, and partnership development

Batis will work on mobilizing partners and building linkages with various stakeholders such as local government units (at the provincial, city, and municipal levels), private sector (business groups), the academe, other area based civil society and faith-based organizations, and migrants/hometown associations.

AnewAmerica provides low-income new Americans living in the San Francisco Bay Area (all nine counties) with a comprehensive three-year microenterprise development program. Our program, Assets for New Americans: Virtual Business Incubator (VBI), is made up of three key areas: business incubation, asset building and building community through social responsibility.

The business incubation component of our program involves a 25-week certificate program in Business Planning, hosted by local colleges and universities. Throughout this course, our entrepreneurs learn business concepts, market analysis, marketing and sales skills, product development, green business best-practices and financial management. The course integrates computing skills training, enabling entrepreneurs to access business technology education and equipment to build their capacities. After entrepreneurs have graduated from the business planning phase, we offer small workshops and one-on-one technical assistance to provide them with business coaching and specialized help with business development, expansion and retention. Select entrepreneurs participate in the Anew-E-Store (operated in partnership with eBay’s Worldofgood.com), which educates entrepreneurs about online markets and assists them in establishing their online storefront, making their products available to a global marketplace.

In the area of asset building, our “Family Assets: Community Wealth” program provides financial literacy seminars and individualized technical assistance to our entrepreneurs. These services provide education and training in the areas of long term financial planning, family and business budgeting, money management, savings, banking services, home-buying and foreclosure prevention education, credit education, credit repair, and access to credit for family or business purposes.

Our third concentration, building community through social responsibility, represents the integration of social consciousness, community empowerment and environmental stewardship into all aspects of our VBI program. Throughout our program, entrepreneurs receive education about how to be an environmentally, socially and civically-engaged business owner. They write and implement a “Social Responsibility Project” as a requirement for graduation. The Green Business Certificate program is the most robust social change tool within our social responsibility program. It educates and encourages all entrepreneurs to develop green businesses.

Ultimately, VBI empowers the new American family with the tools and the support necessary to achieve the dream of business ownership and long-term financial sustainability. AnewAmerica’s work is about giving new Americans long-term economic and social empowerment—the only way to self-sufficiency.

Grassroutes
1 Works with village communities in setting up their villages as tourism destinations. This involves:
• orientating local communities on various aspects of responsible tourism
• Training local communities to dispense quality hospitality services,
• Providing infrastructure building support to accommodate tourists
• Institutional building like the village tourism committees are built to manage tourism in their villages.
2. Promotes & publicize these village destinations, each villages’ uniqueness is packaged and marketed.
3. Monitors the changes in socio cultural conditions arising due to responsible & monitors the quality the of the hospitality services