‘We enable refugees to thrive through the power of their own ideas,’ says Fraser. ‘We are the leading business support provider for refugee entrepreneurs in the UK, currently working with about 700 refugee founders from right across the country and helping them build their business ideas and grow in the market.’
TERN was born in 2016 after Fraser, then 22, spent time in the refugee camps of Kos in Greece and the Jungle in Calais. ‘The reality of experiencing forced migration is that no matter your professional background, you will almost certainly end up in relative poverty in a new country. For us, that felt fundamentally unjust. And we think entrepreneurship is a powerful way to correct that injustice.’
Nine years on, TERN has worked with 900 refugee entrepreneurs and helped launch 150 new refugee-led businesses. One of their biggest success stories is an Uzbek chef who worked his way up from a market stall to opening a restaurant in central London and sponsoring the biggest central Asian food festival in the UK, hiring 45 staff from the local community.
‘70% of people we work with have started businesses outside of the UK, but are not connected to the UK market,’ Fraser explains. TERN helps them develop ideas that are relevant to UK customers. ‘We test them and get feedback. And then we have a range of industry incubators. So in the Uzbek example, we have a food incubator focused on helping them start to trade in the UK food market, and we have the same for change makers and social entrepreneurs, for e-commerce, for makers and creators. We work across 25+ industries,’ says Fraser. ‘40% of our community is now actively trading in the UK and the business survival rate is currently at 75% over three years. So that’s about 10% higher than the UK average.’
TERN is now shifting to working on systems that support refugee entrepreneurs, launching a micro credit fund lending at zero interest and lobbying for asylum seekers to be able to access self-employment so they can earn a living and even create jobs while waiting for their refugee status.
‘As societies, we need to stop managing this as a crisis, and recognise that if we invest in people, there is a huge amount that they can bring to communities through their resilience, through their experience and through their ambition.’