Entrepreneurship

Wharton's Katherine Klein speaks with Julienne Oyler, co-founder and CEO of the African Entrepreneur Collective, about helping refugee entrepreneurs thrive.

People have to trust us with their livelihoods, and we have to deliver, and that’s a lot of responsibility, and it takes a lot of humility. The second thing is that the level of humility that it takes is really important to note. The first thing that we did is we called every person and said, “Do you have access to a smart device, a phone or a tablet? I think all of that has led to the significant repayment rates that we’re seeing in these communities where there’s very little other financing. We want to make sure that they have the proper skills before taking on investments. Once they join the program, then we have a pretty scripted curriculum where people learn bookkeeping, inventory management, sales — anything that any business needs to know anywhere in the world and would find through either online courses or through other trainings that you would get in the community. What’s really exciting is to help people who know the solutions that are needed, to help them bring those ideas to market, get those ideas out to more people and in more places. We found for us that the best way of doing that would be having our trainer sit with somebody in a classroom style, walk them through the exercises, and then follow up with them one-on-one throughout the week, in between classes. We’re a really values-driven organization, and one of our core values is that all problems in Africa have solutions that already exist in Africa. This is what motivates us to go out into our communities and find entrepreneurs who know how to solve the most pressing problems in their communities through their own innovations, their goods, their services. And what I found is that the driver of the economy in these camps – it’s not aid. When you walk through the streets of a refugee camp, these dirt roads that have people pushing past you, pushing bicycles, carrying wood and crates of tomatoes, where you have mobile money agents. I realized that for the 20,000 people living in this place, this wasn’t the middle of nowhere.