Lydia Hatch | Palladium - Jan 08 2019
Palladium Partners with Tent Partnership for Refugees

The Tent Partnership for Refugees, founded by Hamdi Ulukaya, CEO and founder of Chobani, works with the private sector to develop and implement opportunities that support refugees. Tent works to integrate refugees into supply chains, invest in and hire refugees, and deliver services they need. Tent knows that refugees are economically-productive workers, suppliers, entrepreneurs, and customers that can drive a healthy bottom line for businesses and support local economies. At the same time, businesses are creating jobs for refugees, helping integrate them into communities, and offering stability.

Tent has impacted over 200,000 refugees in 34 countries. Palladium is now joining Tent’s list of over 100 partners, including several Fortune 500 companies such as Unilever, Microsoft and Starbucks.

Palladium and Tent will work together to identify opportunities for refugees in our work with corporations, governments, and non-profits as well as our partners’ work. We will continue to create sustainable business ecosystems that are inclusive of refugees and educate the local authorities, governments, and corporations we work with to develop connections between refugee populations and market development.

Our history of working with refugees
Through our work in impact investing, economic growth, workforce development, healthcare, and emergency humanitarian response, we have learned the potential of connecting refugee communities with the private sector to create viable business opportunities.

Below are some of the highlighted projects from our portfolio:

  • Uganda: Learning and Dissemination of the Humanitarian Emergency Response for Uganda (HERRU) was a small project to facilitate, extract, and disseminate shared learnings from the HERRU programme. HERRU provided life-saving assistance and incorporated long-term strategic planning of emergency response, including testing new ways of strengthening resilience and self-reliance. It was designed to contribute to global policy initiatives, particularly the Grand Bargain as well as the Comprehensive Refugee Response Framework (CRRF), of which Uganda is a pilot country. The aim of the Learning and Dissemination project was to ensure that findings are built on by future humanitarian programmes in Uganda and globally.

  • Uganda: The Refugee and Host Community Intervention was an innovative 12-month pilot project to demonstrate the potential of market systems approaches to refugee situations. More than 2,000 refugees and host community members have taken advantage of special promotions to buy improved seeds and plant commercially-focused plots of land with the expectation of selling at the end of the season. Seed companies have seen an increase in sales of more than £11,000.

  • Indonesia: The International Organisation for Migration (IOM) Regional Cooperation Agreement programme has improved the condition of migrants transiting in Indonesia en route to Australia. More than 8,000 migrants have received primary provisions of food, shelter, emergency medical care, counselling, and assisted voluntary returns. Recognising the importance of physical, cognitive, and psychosocial development throughout a person's life, IOM initiated the Circle of Care Programme (ICARE) with seven NGOs in 2013 to provide services tailored to specific needs of migrants with additional vulnerability.

  • Mali: Palladium partnered with the Norwegian Refugee Council to conduct a conflict analysis of northern Mali in preparation for the scale up of their humanitarian intervention. The team conducted field research across Mauritania and northern Mali to capture the evolving drivers of conflict and to understand key conflict actors’ perceptions of humanitarian interventions. Norwegian Refugee Council used the analysis to ensure that their interventions were conflict sensitive.
Contact Emily Kingsley-Ma for more information.