One more week and I am finally leaving for Rwanda but first I want to do something small for the refugees. Every newspaper, tweet or Facebook post one sees at the moment is about the refugee crisis in Europe. European governments aren’t keen on taking in refugees and are pretty much waisting time on red tape. In order to help I decided to use our microStart Antwerp microfinance agency as a drop off for clothing and other household supplies in good condition for refugees. Today, we have already collected a full room of quality material ready for donation to NGO’s that work with refugees.
While stacking the boxes on top of each other I remembered the story of Omarghol Fawad, one of my microfinance customers in November 2014. He was a refugee from Afghanistan and needed a microcredit to expand his carwash. For most banks Omarghol Fawad was ‘unbankable’. When I met Omarghol Fawad and his wife I immediately knew they were credit worthy. They had met each other in a refugee center in Belgium, they had the right to take welfare but never did. They went straight from the refugee center to starting up their own business. Today, we have given 400,000 euro in microcredits to the Afghan community in Antwerp. Most of them were refugees. It is a known fact that humanitarian refugees have the highest rate of business ownership of all recent migrants. This fact does not only count for Australia but most countries around the world.
