The power of nurturing refugee businesses

This report is the culmination of a two-year independent evaluation of Inkomoko’s business support and loan’s initiative. Founded in and around Rwandan refugee camps in 2012, Inkomoko offers business training, consultancy and financial opportunities to camp residents with refugee status and local citizens. An estimated 22% of the world’s refugees currently live in camps (UNHCR, 2021). Refugee communities may now reside for decades in these once temporary places. These figures denote the increasing pressure support organisations and camp residents face in these settings. We established the featured project in 2020, to examine what kinds of impacts business support in camps could have and whether these transferred easily between different countries. This report offers insights from a comparative analysis of survey data from Inkomoko’s Rwandan and Kenyan programs and an in depth mixed methods case study of their expansion into Kakuma, Kenya. The project was supported by three UK Universities and funded by the British Academy of Management and Society for the Advancement of Management Studies.