Global Business and Refugee Crises

Global Business and Refugee Crises finds that companies around the world can make unique and valuable contributions to refugee response by engaging refugees not as aid recipients, but as employees, producers, investees, and customers. The position of global enterprises as market leaders, policy influencers, and innovators gives them distinctive capacities for engagement and advocacy that do not exist within the traditional refugee response community. By including refugees in their core business activities, global enterprises can achieve social impact, gain reputational benefits, and build brand loyalty, while maintaining or enhancing their bottom line. 

The report also makes recommendations on how global businesses can partner with governments and humanitarian and development actors to advance policy reforms and programs that enable success and ensure that solutions meet the needs and protect the rights of refugees. It also highlights that global companies should engage in ways that benefit both refugees and host communities to promote sustainability and local support for their efforts and that they should develop resources and mechanisms that increase effectiveness of and accountability for their corporate refugee initiatives. 

This research was a collaboration between the Tent Partnership for Refugees and the Center for Global Development, a think tank working to reduce global poverty and improve lives through innovative economic research that drives better policy and practice by the world’s top decision makers.