2nd Summit, 2019
From 31st October to 1st November, the Centre for Entrepreneurs, supported by NatWest, hosted the 2nd annual Global Refugee Entrepreneurship Summit. Following the successful inaugural summit last November with 80 attendees from 20 countries, this year the Centre convened 140 people for two action-packed days of knowledge exchange, networking and collaboration. The summit brought together members of the Refugee Entrepreneurship Network, practitioners running refugee entrepreneurship programmes, philanthropists, international organisations, researchers, including: Catalysr (Australia), SSI, Migraflix (Brazil), Settlement Services International (Australia), NyföretagarCentrum (Sweden), BCNA, Business Center for New Americans (USA), IDEMA (Turkey), Ana and Vlade Divac Foundation (Serbia), Kiva (USA), Refugee Investment Network (USA), FAIRE (France), University of Loughborough (UK), The Asfari Foundation (UK).
Inaugural Summit, 2018
November 2018 saw the inaugural Global Refugee Entrepreneurship Summit, co-hosted by the Government Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy in London. More than 80 practitioners from 20 countries came together for a day of knowledge-exchange, action and networking. In workgroups of ten, participants spent most of the day designing their own solutions for the sector’s challenges. Attendees comprised of philanthropists, investors, researchers, entrepreneurs, and of course refugee entrepreneurship programmes, including: The Entrepreneurial Refugee Network (UK), SINGA Business Lab (Germany), DELITE LABS (Netherlands), African Entrepreneur Collective (Rwanda), Startups Without Borders (Egypt), 51 Labs (Iraq), the Turkish Entrepreneurship Foundation, Ygap (Australia) and the Entrepreneurship Support Program for Refugee Empowerment (Japan).