Description

CHALLENGE

Project Ahead contributed to set up Dialogue, a social business incubator located at the heart of the city of Naples. The incubator offers support services, mentoring, and training activities to foster the creation of multi-cultural social businesses to aspiring local and migrant entrepreneurs. However, the latter face far more obstacles than the former to connect to the business community. Such disconnection hampers the success of their enterprises. They meet hindrances in:

1. Demonstrating their educational and professional experience, providing evidences of their educational and work experience can prove hard. Failing to demonstrate them can jeopardize their access to finance, or to buy properties to settle their businesses etc. 
2. Communicating in the host country language. Migrants tend to use their mother tongue in family and with friends. They speak Italian mainly at work. Thus, they have few occasions of improving their language skills, which are key for their entrepreneurial success.
3. Reaching central urban area. Migrant communities tend to live in suburb areas where housing is more affordable than in cities. Such areas are poorly connected to the city through public transport network. However, developing a business at the heart of the social and business community is crucial to the business success.
4. Relying on a supporting network. Far from their families, migrants cannot rely on a network that supports them in starting up their own company, by helping dealing with the daily life, taking care of households or just cheering them up.

We are looking for new solutions as those implemented so far are not sufficient, since they do not respond to the needs of our participants as a whole –they provide a one-to-one answer with no extensive reach – and also as we are losing potential new participants - i.e. since they can’t reach us if they do not have a private car.

We are looking for new tools through which the targeted beneficiaries can learn languages, providing a wide range of services; solutions for mobility from suburbs to the city center; simple and friendly solutions to prove the educational and work experience of migrants ; tools to create new and nurture established relationship. We are looking for ambitious solutions than can be simple to implement

CONTEXT

Naples is the main city in Southern Italy, third in Italy. The migrant population of the Campania region, whose Naples is capital, mostly lives in the city, peaking 70.000 units. However, a considerable number of them are scattered through the surrounding area and the suburbs (more than 50.000) (De Filippo and Strozza, 2014). They are mainly from Ukraine (22%), Romania (18%), Morocco (9%) (De Filippo and Strozza, 2014). They are the main target group of the Dialogue incubator activities.