Empowering Refugees with Skills for Remote Work Success: The Na'amal Story with Lorraine Charles

Discover how Na'amal's Lorraine Charles is transforming lives by equipping refugees with remote work skills that pave the way for sustainable careers.

Today we discover the potential of remote work in empowering displaced individuals in Africa and the Middle East to support their families, even in the absence of traditional employment opportunities. Lorraine describes the incredible journey of these learners as they transition from students to skilled professionals, now contributing to the global workforce via the Na'amal's agency, and how they are managing to give back to their communities.

But beyond social enterprise, the business case is clear when clients keep coming back for more, proving the high quality and dedication of the refugee talent. The practical aspects of hiring and payment processes are also simplified, as we learn about accessible international transaction services and the game-changing nature of mobile money in Africa. Our discussion opens up new perspectives on the power of mentorship, showcasing how connections formed through Na'amal can lead to growth, direct employment, and the strengthening of a supportive global community.

Finally, we touch on how YOU can help, and incredible value of mentorship.

This episode is not just a conversation, it's an invitation to be a part of something bigger—a global movement towards a more connected and empathetic world.

Join us and be inspired by the stories of success, resilience, and the collective power of mentorship in making a difference.

Follow Lorraine here:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/lorraine-charles/

And find out all the ways you can support and get involved with Na'amal at
https://naamal.org/get-involved/

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:05

you're listening to the remote work europe podcast, the show formerly branded as the future is freelance. The name has changed, but our values have not. We're still the podcast for solopreneurs, digital nomads and slowmads, consultants, remote workers, e-residents and everyone living a life without traditional boundaries. We're here for people who defy categorization, those who make a living and a life their own way in Europe and beyond. Fortnightly, on Fridays, we're serving up expert tips, inspired insights and stories from the frontiers of freelancing and the remote work revolution to help you achieve success with your borderless business and liberated lifestyle. Whatever success means to you as you live life on your borderless business and liberated lifestyle. Whatever success means to you as you live life on your own terms.

Speaker 1: 0:54

Here at Remote Work Europe, we're fortunate enough to be able to choose where we want to live and do the kind of work we want to do from pretty much anywhere that we want to make home. It's easy to forget how lucky that is when so many people in the world have to leave their homes, live in a displaced way. They might have to undertake incredibly difficult journeys, not because they choose to or to upgrade their lifestyle, but simply in order to survive. Remote work brings so many powerful things to our own situations that it's easy to overlook how absolutely life-changing or life-saving remote work could be for people with less born privilege.

Speaker 1: 1:32

For me, it was incredibly inspiring to talk to Lorraine Charles from Namaal, who is working with refugee populations in Africa and the Middle East to teach them remote work skills which can support them and help them support their families and create lasting careers in a way that's location independent. For people whose lives have been changed by location issues, it's hard to underestimate how powerful this could be. So I'm sure you're going to enjoy this interview with Lorraine Charles and please check the show notes to find out ways that you can get involved with NAML, including volunteering, funding, support and mentorship, to help other remote workers enjoy the same kinds of ideas and privileges that we do. So, lorraine, thank you very much for joining us here at the Remote Work Europe podcast. It's great to have you with us.

Speaker 2: 2:20

Thank you, it's really exciting to be here.

Speaker 1: 2:23

Well, I'm looking forward to learning all about the amazing work you're doing at Namal. But before we go there, we love to talk a little bit to our guests first about their own personal journey. How we end up doing the things we do is so unique and fascinating for each person, so please tell us a bit of the Lorraine story first.

Speaker 2: 2:40

Thank you. So I always started to say I'm a reluctant entrepreneur, I didn't set up to have my own startup, I didn't want to have my own business, I didn't want to do any of this, but I was a researcher. I am a researcher so I was doing research, looking at the challenges that refugees faced in the Middle East, looking particularly at that time at Jordan and Turkey and then later Lebanon, and first I started looking at education. But I became interested in what happens post K-12 education, what happened to refugees after they finished school? And if you look at the funding for higher education, the funding decreases the older the refugees get. So at the time I was doing this research, less than 5% of refugees attended higher education. Now it's a bit higher and there's a target by UNHCR for 15% by 2030.

Speaker 2: 3:30

So I was curious to understand what happened as secondary education. So I started to research livelihoods, wanted to understand what the livelihood contexts were for Syrian refugees in the Middle East, and I spoke to lots of different organizations and I saw lots of organizations doing great training in digital work. They would be becoming coders. They were doing loads of really cool digital stuff. But the context around the Middle.

Speaker 2: 3:52

East in terms of employment at that time and still now, was very challenging for refugees. Refugees didn't have access to employment legal employment in the countries that hosted them. So refugees in Lebanon don't have access to the labor market. In Jordan they have limited access, more than Lebanon, but still limited. In Turkey, better than the other two, but still there was a quarter of the number of refugees per Turkish national that a company could hire. So I thought and I have to put a caveat, this was 2015 that I was doing my research.

Speaker 2: 4:26

At that time, I was working remotely myself as a researcher. You know, I was doing research with people from different parts of the world, you know, living in the Middle East and doing research with different people, and I was working remotely. So my big recommendation from this research was to reconceptualize employment for refugees, turn it into remote work for refugees. So I wrote an article for the World Economic Forum at the end. It was published at the end of 2017, of course, written way before that. Remote work for refugees how can this be true? How can this happen? So initially I only started to do research and I went back to Jordan and to Turkey and to Lebanon to do more research, to present research to talk about this issue, and at that time I was sort of vaguely interested in sort of who's doing this, what could happen. And the other gap that I saw was there wasn't a focus on the soft skills. So from my research and education, there was a whole lot of conversation around 21st century skills for young people, but this wasn't being translated into refugee programming. So when the programs taught the technical skills, it was only the technical skills. They might mention the soft skills, but it wasn't explicit. And we know that companies are very interested, and perhaps more so, in people that have these soft skills, the technical skills. So these are the two gaps that I saw.

Speaker 2: 5:45

Fast forward. A year later, a couple of years later, I met someone over Skype in those days, way before we had Zoom and you know, and she said well, why aren't we doing something? No one's doing this, we have to form an organization to do this. So that's when the idea of Naama was born. We didn't register for a long time. We had lots of conversations, again, pre-covid. No one believed that this was possible. I had lots of conversations yeah, interesting idea, not viable, not scalable, not possible, and you know.

Speaker 2: 6:14

But so I sort of quietly persisted whilst doing other things in the background. I had lots of conversations, but the remote workspaces is the space that sort of found me and they were captivated by the idea. All the remote workers, all of you, my audience, you were the first ones to believe it was possible because you were doing it. So it was good that I had confidence, bolstered by the remote work community.

Speaker 2: 6:34

Laurel Farrar and all of the early remote work community really believed in what I was doing, and this is where I thought oh, there is something to this, because there's a community of companies, of people who are doing it way before the rest of the world woke up to it. And when COVID happened, suddenly my inbox flooded. Suddenly, there was interest in my work. Suddenly, we had people coming to us and you know. So we did our first project in Jordan in 2020, in the midst of COVID, because everyone was remote, so what we were doing seemed normal. At the time, our proposition seemed yeah, this is what everyone was doing, this is what refugees can also do. So that's how I came to the place of doing that.

Speaker 1: 7:14

That's amazing. It's an incredible story and especially that you started it all. As you said back before, this was a mainstream way of working. Some of us had been doing it for a long time but we were strange, we were unusual, we were a curiosity and people would look at us and think, well, that would never work as a mainstream way. That's even affluent Western audiences and people. That's never going to catch on.

Speaker 2: 7:38

Oh, that's not a real job, right? Yes, okay, you don't have a real job. You're not going into an office, exactly.

Speaker 1: 7:52

Yes, heaven, spare us from real jobs. In that case, indeed, indeed. So that's what led on to the foundation of Narmal and what's the origins of that word. First of all, and we'll put all the links in the show notes where people can find out more so when I first you know when I was talking to my you know, to the person that sort of inspired me to found this.

Speaker 2: 8:06

you know we're throwing around the word WeWork, but of course WeWork exists as a company. I'm like we can't be WeWork, don't go there.

Speaker 1: 8:14

It's sort of you know it's sort of poison.

Speaker 2: 8:16

So we wanted to, you know. So I wanted to have something around work, because that's what we're doing. Talking about work, I lived, I was living in the Middle East I'm still sort of part-time in the Middle East. I was in a coffee shop on my phone talking to someone and then this lovely lady across the table across from me said oh, I heard you talk about refugees, what do you do? I'm Syrian. And I said, oh, wow. So I told her what I was doing, told her the idea of Naamal, I said but I'm stuck for a name. And she said what about Narmal? It means we work in Arabic and I thought oh, my God, yes, but also Amal also means hope. So it's written differently in Arabic, but it sounds the same when you say it, especially English Amal hope and Amal work. So we hope, we work, play on words. So for me it was perfect, because I believe work gives hope.

Speaker 1: 9:08

I love that. So the concept of hope is embedded in the phrase. We work Exactly, exactly. That's beautiful, that's beautiful. So obviously that was back 2020. It feels like an epoch ago now that that event happened and the world changed. Remote work changed. Where are things at now? What projects are you involved with and how has it come of age in this strange new world with its more recent refugee crises?

Speaker 2: 9:36

Yeah, so I look back. Someone said to me yesterday often we look where we are and think we have so far to go, but we don't look back to see how far we've come and sometimes I forget to look back. I often forget to look back when I look back and now that we're speaking I look back and I think where we were then and where we are now. In Arabic we have this with Alhamdulillah. We're growing our team constantly.

Speaker 2: 10:02

We have two big projects, one in Kenya and one in Ethiopia, pretty big projects, and the projects that are happening now will be our second ones. We started in those countries last year, so last year were our first projects in Kenya and Ethiopia. They will be continuing with new funding, same donors, new funding for new projects this year Expanding in Kenya, doing train the trainer as well as training refugee talent. We just graduated our two cohorts of Ethiopia and Kenya a week and a half ago and it was inspirational to see the learners. The learners. They aren't only doing well, they're speaking publicly about their experiences. You know they're on panels, they're talking about it.

Speaker 1: 10:40

We also. We're so emotional actually to see. I can see that in your voice. Yes, extremely.

Speaker 2: 10:47

We also have another project, a big research project, a randomized control trial, which is a test trial to understand the impact of digital training on large numbers. So we also have that. That's a global program and I think, most significantly and importantly, we started, and we did this as a result of a few things. So initially our goal was to provide each and every one of our talent with a job, with an internship, post-training, but it proved very, very difficult to get companies to hire the talent. And again, in one of our running, remote communities, I was on this sort of mastermind run and I was the one talking about my challenge, you know, with the community helping, talking about my challenge, you know, with the community helping, and one of the community said he says, lorraine, I won't hire one of your talent, but I'll outsource a project to you. And suddenly I'm like, okay, this is what I need to do Build the agency and get companies to outsource projects to us. So that's what we did. A month later we started the NAML agency, literally a month later. So we started in December the normal agency with you know, we have projects doing web dev, digital marketing, digital media, design projects. So a quite a, quite a wide range of projects.

Speaker 2: 12:03

Our refugee talents do the work. Our tech leads are the ones that ensure that the product is on, delivered to the client. You know, test to level that exceeds the expectations I always say exceeds because it always does exceed the client's expectations whilst the talent do the work. So this is how we built a system provide all of our refugee talent experience. They get paid for the work, get paid. You know very competitive rates. You know at least four times what they'd get paid in the country where they live and they're getting the experience. They often are client facing. So they get the experience speaking to clients and our goal is with the agency, to. Each of our cohorts of graduates will stay with the agency for a year, get the experience, get some money and then we want them to go off on their own so we can have new cohorts coming to the agency because we want to be able to provide our talent with experience doing the work, yes, and it's a career development process for them that hopefully after a year they might be employed directly.

Speaker 1: 13:04

The client they've been working with Exactly.

Speaker 2: 13:06

Yes, yes, so you know, so we have, yes, so we have a you know, a number of clients and in fact, so we have a number of clients and in fact, the first client we got, a sort of a UK startup. He was so happy that we have three other projects with him ongoing now and one more in the pipeline. So this just shows that's proof of the pudding.

Speaker 1: 13:27

Exactly, you might get the first project out of some kind of sympathy or social food notion, but if it's coming back for three more projects, then, it's absolutely proved the use exactly, yeah, so we and you know, and we're always scoping for new projects.

Speaker 2: 13:42

You know we have. You know we have the capacity and also we're building our internal capacity so that we can then take on more projects we have, in fact, we have one of our tech leads was one of our alumni. He's sort of on sabbatical now and then, you know, we'll sort of take on another tech lead who is kind of one of our alumni as well, for another program that we partner with. We're hiring two more of our alumni to work in our Ethiopia program. So we are again practicing what we're preaching we're hiring the people that we train because we know how good they are and we feel by doing this, the clients not only get to see working with the talent, but when they see the talent on our core team normal emails they think, okay, yes, we can do this as well.

Speaker 1: 14:28

Yes, this is an organization that feels like it has substance to it and a growing track record now of several years, so that's amazing. So this is the projects in Ethiopia and Kenya. They're working with internally displaced people.

Speaker 2: 14:41

No refugees. So in Ethiopia, our talent are from Eritrea. We do have some Ethiopians, under-resourced Ethiopians, but Eritrean refugees, and a couple of Yemeni refugees. In Kenya, they're from Sudan, south Sudan, drc and Somalia, and then we have some under-resourced Kenyans as well.

Speaker 1: 15:02

Amazing. So people are gaining skills and careers that they can maybe one day take back to the place they grew up or take somewhere else Exactly, and I think for me, what's most impressive about our alumni is they all want to give back.

Speaker 2: 15:14

When we ask them what are your ambitions, they don't say I want to work for Google to make a lot of money. I want to do something you know all of their ambition is to support their communities. You know, to do good, to support the world, and for me that's most inspiring.

Speaker 1: 15:29

Yeah, it sounds amazing. Years ago, back when I had proper jobs before I was remote I worked in community development in London and the refugee population and this will give you a sign of the dates they were mostly Somali and they were families who fled to London. We did a lot of work with the women there, but what struck me most about these people was their frustration at not being able to work Not even I was doing remote work then and also their sheer creativity and enterprisingness, the incredible journeys that they'd gone on. They actually represented the most forward thinking, the brightest, the most creative, resourceful problem solvers, probably of their generation, who'd seen the writing on the wall and got out and got their families out. And it just seems such a loss to the local economy and to the world in general that they weren't allowed to work and they had no way to use those skills to support themselves, which was all they wanted to do. It seems that remote work is such a powerful way to unlock that.

Speaker 2: 16:27

Remote work unlocks talent, this talent. Often, if we think of refugees and I want to, you know, because our audience is mostly from Europe the media portrays this idea that there's a refugee crisis in Europe. I want to say now, there is no refugee crisis in Europe. The refugee crises are the countries that border the countries in conflict. That's where a large number of refugees are. In Kenya alone, there's 600,000 refugees. It has the largest refugee camp in the world, the Kakuma refugee camp. In Jordan, there are over well unregistered, perhaps over a million Syrian refugees. In Lebanon, perhaps a similar number. These are the places that experience refugee crises.

Speaker 2: 17:07

Europe does not have a refugee crisis. So I think we have to really stop the negative portrayal of refugees. Refugees don't come to Europe because, oh, we want to live somewhere else. They come because they have no choice. They come because they have no choice and no opportunity, and for me, with remote work. So the refugees I live with are living in routes of safety, but often they don't have any opportunity because they live in countries themselves which are under-resourced. So these countries often struggle providing employment for their own population, far less another population. So the opportunities are very limited for the majority, the vast majority. So refugees cross borders to third countries. I say third countries because it's a third country or something as a fourth country they're moving to because they don't have opportunity where they are With remote work.

Speaker 1: 17:58

Yes, and for someone to take that final journey across the sea into Europe. How desperate do you need to be Exactly?

Speaker 2: 18:05

Yes. So with remote work I want to give people the choice. Remote work gives people the choice to migrate or to stay and if they do decide to migrate, they come with skills, with money in their pockets because they've been working remotely.

Speaker 1: 18:21

That's so powerful, and we talk about the power of remote work within remote work Europe to unlock lifestyle factors you might not have considered, like choice to live near a city you love or within a climate, or near a beach, or things that are more personal, like caring, responsibilities or parenting. It's hard for us in our privileged position to really conceive of the life or death difference it might make to be able to feed your family because you have had a chance to learn a skill that will let you earn some hard currency. It must be so inspiring working with people going through that transformation.

Speaker 2: 18:57

Yeah, it's inspiring, but also it just makes me feel privileged to have the opportunity to work with them. I am inspired every day by the talent we work with. Every day I'm inspired by them and I feel that this talent that we don't recognize and I want to make clear often it's more than just refugee talent. When people in Europe think of people from the Middle East, people from Africa, they have this blanket perception of what they might be like. There is no individual understanding of the talent that's there and even if we don't think about refugee talent, if we think about regular populations who've been to university, who aren't displaced, there is very little understanding in Europe of the talent that are in these places. So I, you know, I do feel that in, you know, many people in Europe have to really leave Europe, go somewhere else. Yes, you want to have your lovely lifestyle in Barcelona or in Gran Canaria, but really you need to understand that there's a lot more to the world than that.

Speaker 1: 20:07

Yes, people need to open their eyes a little bit and I think, to be fair and truth, a lot of the people that we work with they have traveled and they have seen they might have the privilege of their passport and their education to be able to come back to their safe European cities. But I always find that the people who have traveled and lived in other places they've managed to abandon that assumption. They grew up with that.

Speaker 1: 20:30

What's normal for them is normal everywhere and the same priority courtesies and norms, you will see such a different world, and that's what the reference is that traveling from one continent to another on foot, on the ground, under incredibly different circumstances, must witness so much transformation and inequality and difference.

Speaker 2: 20:50

Yes, but I think we also have to dispel the notion that places in Africa aren't safe. There are places which are not safe, but also there are many European cities that I would not go to. So I think we have to really understand that this is not a European thing being safe and a non-European thing being not safe. I go to Nairobi often, one of my favorite cities, love that city. It is incredible, like so vibrant, so much fun, and I don't feel unsafe there. So I think and Kenyans are the most talented people that I've met like incredible people. So I think we have to really understand that Europe isn't the center of the world anymore. We have to break, you know, decolonize our minds, as my friends and I say decolonize your mind.

Speaker 1: 21:32

Absolutely. I love that and getting to collaborate internationally the way that remote work technology now lets us do. It's the perfect vector to do that, and you know so. If somebody wanted to work with Namal as an agency to hire the kind of talent you have on offer, well, give me a, give me a pitch now. Who could I? What kind of talent might be useful for me? If somebody with an organization is listening and they want to recruit, who could you offer them?

Speaker 2: 22:00

If you want a website, built a website, an app, digital marketing, any tech design project we can do. We have the talent. And also, I think also what's important is we want our talent to be exposed to things. Our tech leads are incredibly talented. So even if the talent doesn't have the experience, the tech leads help them get to the level that they need to to deliver the client. Sometimes there's more handholding than we would like, but we understand that it's a process and all of the refugee talent they learn very quickly. So after the first time they've learned it, the second time they really can fly on their own. They really can do it. Any tech work that you need our talent can do and, for example, one of our talent says she wants to have her own game design. For example, one of our talent says she wants to have her own game design, video game design company. So we have talent that can do that. I mean, yeah, they're just inspirational.

Speaker 1: 22:55

It does sound incredible. So if I wanted to hire a designer or a developer through Namal, how would I pay them? How would that reach them? How sustainable would it be? Yeah, so you pay us.

Speaker 2: 23:06

So you pay NAML. So it depends. You can either hire the talent directly yourself. They all have ways to be paid. A lot of them have Payoneer.

Speaker 1: 23:14

Payoneer is a big global company like PayPal, they can also use PayPal.

Speaker 2: 23:18

Also, a lot of them have their own bank accounts in Kenya and Ethiopia. They have their bank accounts. Or often if you've got a project but you need a team to develop, you hire NAML and we build the team. We work with you to understand your needs and we deliver the project to you. So you have the contract with us as an organization or one of our partners.

Speaker 1: 23:38

And you coordinate all of those moving parts, the different skills that are required, exactly.

Speaker 2: 23:44

Yeah, because you know, for a lot of projects multiple skill sets are needed. So we have those skill sets within our community of talent.

Speaker 1: 23:51

Fantastic, and I wanted to cover off that bit about contracting and payment because I think that's the thing that still trips people up internationally sometimes and I know that Africa is streets ahead of Europe in electronic payment and mobile payment yes. People may not realize that.

Speaker 2: 24:11

Yeah, I mean, I had a conversation with someone in Uganda this morning and I said in Kenya, I don't know what a Kenyan bill looks like the whole time I was in Kenya I have never used it. Everyone uses M-Pesa, which is a digital wallet. You go to the street vendor to buy some mangoes, you pay with M-Pesa. Everything you do, you pay with M-Pesa. Everything you do, you pay with M-Pesa. Or you can use your bank card. But they're miles ahead. And also, for example, I often go to my friends like, oh you know. Some person says, oh, can you transfer money to me? You have to go. You know, punch in the bank details. With M-Pesa it's linked to your mobile phone, so you literally go to the app, put their mobile phone number and you some money.

Speaker 1: 24:43

So much easier, miles ahead of what we are here yeah, I mean we've had that in europe, but now only for the last couple of years, whereas I know africa has had it, because you didn't have the banking infrastructure and the landline infrastructure you built that first and it's just one of those things that's so unevenly distributed still. But with the agency now mal in place, then you can deal with the us corporation who wants to know where to send to Exactly.

Speaker 2: 25:07

Exactly. Yes, you send the check to us and then we pay our talent. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1: 25:12

Amazing. That sounds really perfect. So if people are listening to this in Europe, they might be a remote worker or a digital nomad or an expat. If they're inspired by what they're hearing, how can they support you and spread the word about Narmal, maybe get involved in your projects or helping people who need to be helped that you're in touch with?

Speaker 2: 25:33

Well, we have a fantastic way for people to get involved.

Speaker 2: 25:36

We run a mentorship program and this is actually perfect for digital nomads, people who work remotely, because we're training our talent in the skills to work remotely. So you are our perfect mentor. And at the graduation, which happened a couple of weeks ago, we had a lot of our mentors speak and we also had a sort of a celebration for the mentors after. And I was in pairs because the mentors all of them said you know, the most common thing I heard was I learned more from my mentee than they learned from me. I am so inspired by them. They are incredible. They're so motivated. All of the mentors were so inspired by their mentees and we actually built this program not just to support our refugee learners, which obviously is one of our big goals also to sort of normalize the refugee experience to people who aren't as privileged as I am to work with the refugee talent.

Speaker 2: 26:31

So as a mentor, you get matched one-on-one. You work with your mentee for sort of four to five months. You meet with them twice a month and we have quite a structured program and guide. So if you know if the pair needs structure on how to develop the relationship, we have the guy or they can go off and do. If the mentee knows what they want, then the mentor can guide them, with the mentee taking the lead. But this is a great way for you to actually experience the talent. And what's happened is which is quite incredible a lot of the mentors said well, I've just hired my mentee and his friend to build my website because I was so inspired by them. So I've had a few mentors said, yeah, I've just hired my mentee because I really love what they do. And also we've had one or two of our mentors who've gone on holiday to where their mentees live so they can meet in person.

Speaker 1: 27:19

Amazing. Well, people do business with people, don't they? If you can facilitate those relationships, those connections to develop, anything can happen. The potential there is just immeasurable. I'm excited already. This is going to be filling in your form, I think.

Speaker 2: 27:36

Yes, yes, please. We want, we want. We would love you to be a mentor and anyone passionate about sort of supporting untapped talent and sort of understanding more about the world.

Speaker 2: 27:46

And when we speak to our mentors and my team has quite a open dialogue with the mentors everyone's on a discord channel, so there's quite a big communication between the team and the mentors and also the mentors are developing their own community, so the mentors themselves becomes friends. Um, so many of the mentors you know are they say that their eyes have been opened by what the mentee had experienced. And you know, and one person said what she said was I went to a meeting after something had happened at work and then my mentee told me something that had happened and she said it put my life into perspective?

Speaker 1: 28:24

Yes, I think that's. We often see such a narrow slice of life. Even those of us that have taken the time to travel and maybe to go and build a life, and not in the country we grew up in, we still inevitably narrow our focus and we see what's in front of us and we get upset by things that if you're struggling to survive or to feed your family or to find a safe place to settle, it's a completely different perspective and I think we just it's healthy to be reminded sometimes how trivial our problems are, even when they seem they threaten to overwhelm us.

Speaker 1: 28:55

The problems aren't going to go away but, we can just get them in a little bit of perspective. No one's going to starve here.

Speaker 2: 29:02

Exactly, yeah, exactly, and I believe everyone should have a mentor. All my team have got mentors. I have a mentor. We really believe in the power of mentorship. So, which is why we really advocate for this part of our program, this is the part of our program that we feel most passionate about, because we really believe, it transforms lives.

Speaker 1: 29:19

Well, I would love to send some mentors your way from the Real Networks Europe community. Is there a typical mentor? I mean, what kind of things do you look for?

Speaker 2: 29:27

So because you're mentoring and this sort of professional skills, communication, time management, you know, critical thinking, growth, mindset, goal setting. We've got a guide, so really it's open to anyone. Anyone and the remote work community are especially relevant and important to us because they're doing what our mentees will be aspiring to building a career that's location independent.

Speaker 1: 29:53

Yes, so they have that in common, whatever the differences in nationality or culture or background.

Speaker 2: 29:59

Exactly, yeah, this is the perfect, perfect cohort of mentors for us. We have quite a big mentorship program happening this year and then ongoing with our new programs in Ethiopia and Kenya. We always do mentorship as a core part of our programming.

Speaker 1: 30:13

Okay, and does it work on a cohort basis? Do you recruit at particular times of year?

Speaker 2: 30:18

No, we recruit, rolling recruitment, but then obviously we have different start points depending on the availability of the mentors. So it's quite open, but right now we've got a big program happening right now. So, mentors, we need you.

Speaker 1: 30:33

Okay, we'll consider that a call to action. This episode will go live in May 2024. And if you check the show notes for this episode, you will find all the links both to learn more about NaumL but also that form to express interest and raise your hand. Because if, like me, you've looked at the news every night, I mean maybe heaven help you. You're a Brit in Europe and your head is hanging in shame to see how vulnerable refugees are treated by institutions and the media around our continent.

Speaker 1: 31:06

We have so much privilege here. We have so many accidents of birth. We often struggle with how best to give back, how to help people. There's a sense that you can't help everybody and it's hard. Not everybody is going to be like Lorraine and dedicate their life to running a program to scale this. But what each one of us can do is help one person, and it's as simple as reaching out your hand digitally as a mentor, as a supporter. Make a connection with another human being who will have an incredible story to tell that will probably blow your mind and, as Lorraine was saying, it will get every problem in your life into perspective. But actually you'll find things that you learn from them, just as you're helping to make a difference in their life and possibly their family's lives, their future generations and the local community, that they may even be able to go back to their home community one day and cascade that benefit so really powerful. Is there anything else? You'd like to leave us with a final inspiration to take action on this today?

Speaker 2: 32:06

Oh my goodness, I always want to maybe end with a story, but I can't decide which story to leave with because there's so many amazing stories, oh goodness. Okay, so perhaps yesterday was. You know, the last few weeks have been quite big weeks, lots of stuff happening, but yesterday we launched one of our reports, a report on digital livelihoods for refugees, and we had a panel of refugee panelists from our Kenya program and we had a few technical issues. You know, of course, you can't have a webinar without a technical issue. Each of them was so inspirational.

Speaker 2: 32:45

One of them was part of the first deaf team that built off, that did our first project. She was the only female on the dev team. She is doing her second project with us now, but she has become confident in speaking. She's speaking on public panels. She spoke at an in-person event in Nairobi, the international conference. She spoke at our webinar, which was a global event. So, inspired by her, we also a potential donor that's interested in working with us were visiting Nairobi and Addis and they went to see our programs. They were so inspired by the learners and what they've done that they said to us we want to fund your work. So I think our talent, the people that have been through our programs. They are best. You know that's our best advertisement because they really represent what is possible. They really represent the dream that all of us in our team have that opportunity. You know, opportunity isn't everywhere, but talent is everywhere. Talent is everywhere.

Speaker 1: 33:50

And if we can just help to level out the opportunities just a little bit, that talent will thrive and inspire and grow. And what amazing work to be doing. It's been a great privilege to hear about this from you, lorraine. I'm so grateful that you shared this with the Remote Work Europe community. I really hope that some people listening to this will be inspired to check out those links, find out more, read the report that you just mentioned. I will pop that link in the show notes as well and just maybe some people who want to get involved directly. I really, really hope so.

Speaker 2: 34:23

Yes, please. We encourage all of you to please get involved, please be a mentor, and we have lots of serial mentors. Mentors come back again and again. We have many who are on the fourth time mentoring with us. So it is life changing. People do love the experience.

Speaker 1: 34:39

It sounds mutually incredibly inspiring and rewarding. So let's make it happen. Lorraine, thank you ever so much for joining us today.

Speaker 2: 34:48

Thank you, maya, it's my pleasure, absolute pleasure.

Speaker 1: 34:53

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