It’s a new year and a new adventure for five enthusiastic immigrant entrepreneurs who are hoping to establish social businesses in Ireland in 2025. The five, who hail from Brazil, Nigeria and Ukraine, have just completed a mentorship and training programme with local non-profit organisations EurAV, supported by expert advice from the team at UCD’s Innovation Academy.
The training was part of an transnational project, funded by the EU under its Erasmus Plus initiative, that involved collaboration between The Afghanistan Committee for Peace, Reconstruction, and Culture in Berlin and Training Academy, a training development organisation in Rome.
“This project came out of research done in Germany and Italy,” explained Declan Cassidy, who managed the project for EurAV, “so the first thing we did was to sit our budding entrepreneurs around the table and chat to them about the challenges they faced. It was a real eye-opener!”
Starting up a business isn’t an easy task at the best of times but for immigrant entrepreneurs, EurAV discovered, there are additional layers of difficulty.
“Some of the problems that our immigrant entrepreneurs faced seemed so obvious when they told us. For example, when they try to do their market research by reaching out to their network online, they tend to get feedback only from others in their non-Irish-national community, so it’s hard for them to get a true picture of Irish society at large,” Declan explained. “Also, social media has become such a big part of marketing a business these days. But that becomes a lot more tricky if you’re trying to post in English and that isn’t your first language.”
Another two problems faced by the New Horizons project entrepreneurs were time and space.
“In most cases, immigrant entrepreneurs don’t have the friend and family support network that someone who has been born and raised in Ireland has so they are often sharing accommodation with others and working hard to make ends meet,” said Declan. “This means that they have little spare time to develop their business ideas and often little physical space to work on things like prototypes.”
Declan, who is himself a graduate of UCD’s Innovation Academy, called upon his fellow alumni and tutors to come up with imaginative solutions to these problems.
“We now have five business plans ready to put into action,” he said. “A key part of the New Horizons project was that the business ideas we supported were social enterprises – not just profit making concerns. Most of them involve integration and support for those who have come from other parts of the world but are now trying to fit into, and contribute to, Irish society. With so much turmoil in the world, it’s great to see something so positive.”
