How to Lend Money to Refugees, with Lev Plaves

The refugee population is very much not a monolith, right. In fact, it's a very diverse group. It's 90 million people who broadly are all tied together by the fact that they've been forcibly displaced from their homes, whether to another country - and thus have become refugees - or within their existing country - and are those internally displaced. So if we're looking at this population of 90 million people, similar to any other kind of group or population of the size, the needs are going to be diverse and differ from different people and from different communities.

Refugees come from different socio-economic backgrounds. They are or were doctors, lawyers, restaurant workers, employees, brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers, and so on. And so we often see in the media this image of refugees in a refugee camp, living out of a tent - for many refugees, that's not the reality, right? They've settled in a city or a town or a village. They're not in a camp where they're receiving direct humanitarian assistance, they're looking for opportunities to start small home-based businesses, retail out of home, selling food products, sewing businesses, and so on. Many are looking to start small shops or kiosks even refugees in camps, right?