Editor’s note: Research Money has partnered with Mount Royal University’s (MRU) School of Communications Studies and its students on a project to engage and help train students studying print/digital and broadcast journalism, public relations and information design. This story was written by Sadaf Karami, who is in her final year of MRU’s journalism program, with guidance from Research Money’s managing editor.

By Sadaf Karami 

Refugees in Canada are more likely to run businesses than Canadian-born residents, yet refugees face numerous financing barriers. The Refugee Impact Fund is trying to close that gap.

Fund manager Bradford Turner (photo at right), has spent much of his career mobilizing capital for social change. He sees the Refugee Impact Fund as an “opportunity to fundamentally rethink how we invest in human potential,” he said in an email to Research Money.

 “At a time of unprecedented global displacement, I find it extraordinary that a small charity founded by three Syrian refugees is pioneering Refugee Lens-Investing in Canada,” he said.

“Our thesis isn't about lowering investment standards. It's about recognizing the commercial potential, talent, and economic value that conventional finance has too often overlooked,” Turner said.

Refugee-Lens Investing is an impact-investing strategy that intentionally deploys capital to support forcibly displaced people and their host communities.

Instead of viewing refugees simply as beneficiaries of humanitarian aid, Refugee-Lens investing treats them as economic actors, business owners, employees, and viable borrowers.

The Refugee Impact Fund, an initiative of charity Jumpstart Refugee Talent, is a governance-led investment vehicle intended to mobilize institutional and mission-aligned capital toward refugee-led and refugee-inclusive enterprises across Canada, and is in structured development with a targeted launch of 2027.

Keith Ippel (photo at right), co-founder and co-CEO of Vancouver-based incubator and advisory firm, Spring Activator, is part of the design advisory group that helped the Refugee Impact Fund design and structure the fund.

"The financial system in Canada does not give refugees due credit for education, wisdom, experience, knowledge [and] capability,” Ippel said in an interview. “The Refugee Impact Fund really solves that problem.”

“You have this double jeopardy in the Canadian context where entrepreneurs are generally underfunded and refugees are definitely underfunded,” he said. “And then you have refugee entrepreneurs and business owners, and they're essentially outright excluded.”

“This is one of these no-brainer situations where everybody knows that there is a massive gap in the ecosystem, and this Fund fills it," Ippel said.

Refugee entrepreneurs who arrived in Canada between 10 and 30 years ago run businesses at a rate of 14.4 percent, compared with 12.3 percent of the Canadian-born population, according to data from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees Canada.

The problem is not that refugees lack entrepreneurial drive – it’s access to capital.

 Refugee entrepreneurs in Canada face a lack of financial support

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) 2019 policy brief on refugee entrepreneurship notes that refugees often arrive with substantial prior business experience.

Entrepreneurship can offer an alternative route into the labour market when wage employment is blocked by language barriers, unaccredited credentials, or discrimination.

The barrier is access to finance, which the OECD identifies as a challenge for refugee entrepreneurs, who often lack bank accounts, credit histories, savings, and collateral.

Yet loan guarantees, microfinance, and other alternative financing methods are less commonly included in refugee support programs than in programs for the Canadian-born.

That combination of supports matters in Canada, where the enterprise financing system is dominated by a small number of large, publicly traded chartered banks.

A 2026 analysis by Social Capital Partners found that the institutional design of these banks systematically excludes viable enterprises, including borrowers with thin credit files, limited experience or no tangible collateral, all of which are common characteristics among refugee entrepreneurs.

The report noted that between 2019 and 2024, only 11.5 percent of outstanding business loans in Canada went to small and medium-sized enterprises (SME), compared with an average of 44 percent across OECD countries, like the United States, Australia, Japan, and the United Kingdom.

Canada's main federal financing options, the Canada Small Business Financing Program and the Business Development Bank, operate within similar institutional constraints that Social Capital Partners’ report describes, requiring conventional borrower profiles and credit documentation that many refugee entrepreneurs cannot provide.

Research consistently shows that support for refugee entrepreneurs in Canada concentrates on training, mentorship, and readiness, rather than on capital.

Many Canadian organizations support refugee entrepreneurship

Jumpstart Refugee Talent, the refugee-led charity developing the Refugee Impact Fund, has spent over a decade supporting the economic inclusion of refugees, refugee claimants, and forcibly displaced people by connecting them to meaningful employment and entrepreneurial opportunities.

Their past programs include REinvest, a mentorship program with Angel Investors Ontario where refugee entrepreneurs based in Ontario pitched directly to angel investors for funding, and HER Startup, which supports refugee and forcibly displaced women through training, incubation, and seed funding.

There are numerous examples of Canadian organizations across the country supporting refugee entrepreneurship.

The Immigrants Working Centre in Hamilton, Ont., offers free occupation-specific language training with business startup support, having helped 681 newcomers into work through employment and self-employment from 2016 to 2017.

Immigrant Services Association of Nova Scotia runs business development services providing one-on-one business counselling, foundational training, networking, and mentorship to help immigrant entrepreneurs start, manage, or expand their businesses, including a dedicated Immigrant Women Entrepreneurship Network that explicitly serves refugee women.

Skills for Change in Toronto serves more than 20,000 clients a year, offers settlement, language training, mentorship, and entrepreneurship programs to newcomers and refugees.

And Immigrant Entrepreneur Canada reports supporting more than 2,200 immigrant entrepreneurs in under two years through a retail incubator, community meetups, and mentorship initiatives.

Each program builds skills, connections, and readiness for refugee entrepreneurs, but none provides the capital itself, which is exactly the gap the Refugee Impact Fund is designed to fill.⁠

Refugee Impact Fund will deploy capital through two funding streams

Jumpstart Refugee Talent received grant funding to launch the Refugee Impact Fund from the Definity Foundation, World Education Services (WES), and Rally Assets in 2024, according to WES. The Definity Foundation describing it as a fund that “addresses barriers to accessing capital for refugee entrepreneurs, thereby increasing economic participation and sustainable employment for refugees.”

The Fund is built on a Refugee-Lens Investing (RLI) taxonomy developed by the Refugee Investment Network, classifying deals by whether they are refugee-owned, refugee-led, refugee-supporting, or ecosystem-enabling.

The Refugee Impact Fund’s current investment thesis focuses on businesses within the agriculture, construction and skilled trades, and food production and processing sectors.

The Fund will deploy capital through two tracks.

The microfinance track provides early-stage loans of $10,000 to $25,000 to individual entrepreneurs, with readiness support, and a projected 90 to 95 percent repayment rate.

The growth investment track will deploy structured loans, program-related investment, and blended capital at scale into refugee-led SMEs and ecosystem infrastructure.

The Refugee Impact Fund design was validated through three workstreams.

One focused on capital-provider engagement including Realize Capital Partners, credit unions, Social Venture Connexion, and EY, which surfaced feasible structures and investor risk appetites.

A second drew on market research: focus groups, interviews, Design Advisory Group sessions, and literature reviews, sizing the market against adjacent evidence.

A third tracked live pipeline, documenting real opportunities, ticket sizes, and sector distribution to produce concrete, verifiable deal flow.

Matthias Pries (photo at right), principal, investments at WES, sits on the design advisory group. WES has spent more than 50 years working on credential recognition for immigrants, refugees, and international students.

Pries describes the gap the Refugee Impact Fund is targeting as a structural barrier to accessing capital rather than a skills gap.

Immigrant and refugee entrepreneurs often arrive without Canadian credit history, with limited collateral and short business-operating histories, Pries said in an interview.

But "none of those things necessarily reflect the quality of a business idea or a business, or a founder's commitment or ability to repay,” he noted.

“They may well reflect barriers in a traditional underwriting model for a main street lender. Those models were not built with these entrepreneurs in mind,” Pries said.

The Refugee Impact Fund treats impact as a decision variable alongside risk and return, applying a framework aligned to Canada's Common Approach to Impact Measurement and select IRIS+ metrics, in addition to a Refugee-Lens Investing (RLI) taxonomy.

The RLI taxonomy widens who counts as investable. The Refugee Impact Fund’s design reaches past founders to the businesses that employ, serve, or supply refugee communities.

“The Refugee Lens framework provides that big tent approach that expands the scope of the fund strategy, while maintaining that sort of disciplined approach to the outcomes we're actually seeking to have," Pries said.

He acknowledges the trade-off: a wider scope means more flexible underwriting to include different types of businesses at different stages, and operational challenges the team will have to work through – complexity he said “may well be worth facing head on.”

The premise of the Fund holds that refugee entrepreneurship is a market opportunity rather than a beneficiary category, and that this segment is one that traditional capital rarely reaches, a view echoed by Ippel’s experience in helping design the Refugee Impact Fund.

"Speaking to refugees, identifying where they were at, where they intended to go, what were the roadblocks and hurdles – that was the essential first step,” he said.

“And then the companion step to that was creating a structure that ensured that the people who funded the Fund, who invested in the Fund, could see how that structure managed that mix of risk, financial return, and impact. And so creating this multi-component approach, the Fund was the best way to achieve that," he added.

Ippel added that the Fund’s creation is a necessary, “audacious” endeavour, and that a fund designed by a refugee-led organization, specifically to enhance refugee economic inclusion in Canada, proves that refugee-inclusive businesses are investable.

“Investing in these organizations and leaders creates positive impact that cascades across society,” Ippel said.

There is a cost to not closing the access to capital gap for refugee entrepreneurs.

“Canada is a welcoming country. We welcomed a large number of immigrants and refugees, historically, and we plan to welcome many more. So this problem isn't going away without solutions like this Fund,” Pries said.

“When capital doesn't reach refugees, we all lose out on the potential. So a fund can support the filling of that gap that will result in advancing economic inclusion, collective growth, and then hopefully show future lenders that these entrepreneurs are highly investable,” Pries said.

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Editor’s note: Sadaf Karami is working as a marketing and communications assistant intern for Jumpstart Refugee Talent.