A Better Future? Understanding Refugee Entrepreneurship

Refai, Deema, Lever, John ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2188-8518 and Haloub, Radi (2021) A Better Future? Understanding Refugee Entrepreneurship. Research Report. University of Leeds.

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Abstract

The refugee journey is traumatic, and this can have a profound impact on the desire of refugees to demonstrate their usefulness in a new country. Many refugees also originate from countries with high self-employment rates and research suggests that high numbers of refugees are interested in self-employment when they arrive in new countries (Wauters and Lambrecht 2006; Heilbrunn and Iannone 2020). Moreover, in a changing international policy context focussed on economic development over and above refugee rights and protection (Betts and Collier 2017; Dauvergne 2018; Crawley 2021), there has also been a growing policy emphasis on refugee entrepreneurship (Refai, Haloub and Lever 2018; IOM 2018; Heilbrunn and Iannone, 2020). In the last decade in particular, as the European migration crisis intensified, Syrian refugee entrepreneurs have been the focus of attention, both in countries bordering Syria and in countries across the Global North (Heilbrunn et al. 2019). This report focusses on Syrian refugee entrepreneurs in the UK.