Full transcription of the episode: You’re listening to the Human Rights Chat podcast by New Tactics in Human Rights. I’m your host, Melissa McNeilly. Together with our guests, we explore tactics and strategies driving real human rights change.
For this episode, I sat down with Lorraine Charles, founder and executive director of Na’amal—an organization working to expand access to dignified, remote employment for refugees.
What began as early volunteer work with refugees in London—and later research into barriers to employment in the Middle East—led to a reimagining of what work can look like. Instead of being limited by restrictive labor laws and geography, Na’amal connects refugee talent to global opportunities through remote work, skills training, and innovative partnerships.
Melissa: Lorraine, thanks for joining me on Human Rights Chat.
Lorraine: Yeah, excited to be here.
Melissa: So you are the founder and executive director of Na’amal. Let’s start with you. What first drew you into working in advocacy for refugees?
Lorraine: So, I guess this story started way before I started Na’amal. When I was in my early 20s, I was a volunteer at the refugee council in London. And that really gave me an inside look about the issues that refugees face, moving to a new city, to a new country. But also it was such a wonderful experience meeting the people who had moved to London, meeting the other volunteers, the other people that worked within, you know, the refugee council. And I really loved the experience that I had as a volunteer there. And that’s something that I took with me in all the work, just the sense of fulfillment, but also the camaraderie amongst everyone else working there.
And just the belief that we can make a change. We can do something to make the world a better place. So I think that’s what got me into working with refugees, or the thought of working with refugees, because of that really wonderful experience with the volunteers. And interestingly, the lady who was the main volunteer, I’m going to give her this podcast to listen to. She’s still a really good friend of mine, like decades later. And she still works with refugees even though she’s in her 70s. So really inspirational.
Melissa: Yeah, I love that so much. I always love to start with people’s personal stories, like what brought them into advocacy, because we all have some kind of personal experience or connection. So, thank you for that context. So, let’s zoom out for a moment and talk about kind of the broader challenge that Na’amal addresses. A lot of times, people think humanitarian and human rights work is about addressing basic needs like food and shelter, which it is. Na’amal, of course looks at the right to work, which is of course connected to many other human rights. So, what were the gaps that you were seeing in refugee employment that you wanted to address?
Lorraine: And you said the words the right to work. So, Na’amal was formed as a result of my research. I was doing research on the challenges of refugees face in the Middle East more than 10 years ago. And the gaps that I saw was the very narrow view of how employment was perceived, how employment was practiced. And at that time, refugees were being trained in really, you know, with digital skills, with skills you know, with really high skills. But the places in which they worked and at the time I did the research in Jordan and Turkey and then later in Lebanon, they didn’t have opportunities to work in the local economy.
So in Jordan and Lebanon particularly, the labor law was very restrictive on the work that refugees were allowed to do. And at that time I was doing the research, a long time before COVID, remote work wasn’t you know wasn’t so much a thing. I was working remotely, but most people didn’t understand what remote work was. There was a bunch of sort of, you know, the remote community, a very small niche community, you know they were meeting and I sort of got to know that community, but it wasn’t a thing. And my big recommendation from the research was how can we reconceptualize employment to allow refugees to work at the skill level remotely? Because again the labor laws were silent about refugees working remotely. You know, it sort of stated that refugees couldn’t work at the local companies because the law protected the nationals.
But working remotely, it’s global. You know, you’re competing not with the people in the country, but competing globally, you know. So, why couldn’t this be something that refugees were allowed to do? And in a way, this sort of was a way to sort of supersede the restrictive labor market mechanisms that prevented refugees to work in the countries in which they live. So, that was the first big gap that I saw.
The other big gap that I saw was the skills that refugees were being taught. So, there was a big focus on technical skills. The tech skills, the digital skills, the, I don’t know, marketing. But no focus on the soft skills. And my research around education showed me that there was a big focus on what they call 21st century skills: communication, high time management… But there was no explicit focus on these skills in the training programs that I looked at. You know, so this is where Na’amal was born out of the observation that these two things were lacking, or these two things were overlooked.
Melissa: So, beyond kind of the practical barriers to employment, you also talk a lot about changing how people think about refugees. You talk about dignified employment and kind of shifting the narrative around refugees. So, can you tell me why narrative change is such an important piece of this work?
Lorraine: Yeah, this is something that I talk about a lot. Most people’s perception of refugees is what they see on television, in the newspaper. You see someone who is often from Africa, Middle East, who doesn’t have skills, who’s uneducated, that’s poor. You know, women barefoot pregnant in the kitchen, living in dusty environments, maybe with like an old Nokia phone, not really having the skills to do more.
But we know this isn’t the reality. We know people don’t choose to become refugees. You know, conflict exists independent of what people’s choices are. So, I wanted to show that a refugee can be anyone. And we know what’s happening in the Middle East now, what’s happening in Ukraine. A refugee can literally be anyone. Someone who someday is working for a tech company in their city or in another country with their laptop in their beautiful home. Three days later, a war breaks out in their country through no fault of their own. And they’re forced into leaving everything behind.
So I wanted to show that the refugee story isn’t one story. The refugee story is universal. You and I can be in that situation at any time in our life. So for me, shifting the narrative is to show that refugees are highly skilled, very educated, can work at the highest level, and they become a refugee through a situation beyond their control. So this shifting the narrative is important.
And when we speak about the refugees we work with, we call them refugee talent. And for us, refugee is just one adjective that we use to describe them. It’s used to describe their political status. It doesn’t describe who they are. It doesn’t describe their skills. It doesn’t describe where they’re from. It’s just the political status in which they find themselves. So for me, this narrative shift is really important because the world needs to recognize that first thing, this can happen to anyone. And I think with the war closing in on us, we recognize this can happen to anyone. Number one, and number two, skills are what should be counted. We look at someone’s skills and experience before we look at their political status.
Melissa: Yeah, this is such an important piece, and it really could be any of us at any time. And it’s so important to humanize other people and recognize that we all have human rights.
Lorraine: Yeah, exactly.
Melissa: You talked a little bit about remote work and how that’s so central to your model. Do you want to speak a little bit more on technical revolution and why this is such a powerful solution?
Lorraine: Yeah. So when Na’amal was formed, when we started, it was before COVID. So the whole idea of remote work was, as I said earlier, just for a small niche group of people that were doing what people thought were crazy things. And when I first spoke to a couple of friends about Na’amal, like my one really good UN friend, he said, “but who works remotely?” And I’m like, “I work remotely.” But he says, “But do you have a real job?” I’m like, “Yeah, my job is real. Just because I don’t go to an office every day doesn’t mean that my work is not a real job.” And I think COVID showed us that any job can be done remotely. Work can be done from a cafe in London, from a co-working space in Paris, or from a refugee camp in Kenya.
Work doesn’t depend on location. It depends on the individual, the skills. Yes, there are a lot of things around infrastructure and connectivity which is important, and payment mechanisms. But in reality, the skills should be the pathway toward employment.
And for me, remote work gives people the opportunity to work regardless of where they are. Work should not be determined by your passport, by the color of your skin, or by the location in which you live. Work should be determined by the skills you have and by the experience you have.
So for someone living in a refugee camp, living in an urban capital in a big, in an African country, they should have the same opportunity as someone living in London, or in New York, or in Paris. Why don’t they? The way the global economy is structured, it doesn’t allow, or it didn’t allow, people from the global majority to access jobs in Europe and North America. But now things are changing.
And we have to deconstruct the system which doesn’t work, which excludes people from these countries from accessing the opportunity. So for me, remote work gives people a choice. Migration by choice, not by necessity. You migrate because you want to, for a better opportunity, for an experience, not because you have to for lack of opportunities.
Melissa: That’s so powerful. I just love the work that you guys are doing. Since launching in 2020 during COVID, you’ve developed quite the comprehensive approach to preparing people for this kind of work. So you mentioned soft skills training. You’ve got a lot of partnerships in building digital skills, mentorship, remote placements. What has been most innovative about your approach? You know, here at New Tactics, we’re all about the innovation and/or, have there been any learnings that have stood out to you along the way?
Lorraine: Yeah. I think one advantage of being a sort of smaller startup as opposed to a big international organization or big UN body is that we can be innovative. And then we can adapt and adjust, you know, to the world in which we see. We can change to suit the market demands, as it changes very quickly. And so one of the first changes we made is how we facilitated employment.
So initially the model was, we train someone, we find an employer to hire them. But that’s not the model that we see. As, you know, post-COVID, when a lot of companies weren’t hiring full-time employees the way they were, you know, we thought, “okay, this model isn’t working anymore for us.” But we, you know, companies are still hiring people, but sort of more fractional workers. Outsourcing pieces of work. So, we recognized that we had to adapt to suit the way the labor market was changing.
So, this is why we built the Naa’mal agency, and the Na’amal agency was our solution to support our refugee talent linking to employment. So, we become the intermediary, addressing not just the way that work has changed, but also the reticence of employers to hire the people we train.
Employers want to hire people whose universities they recognize, whose work experience they recognize. If you have on your CV, you know, big names, you know, the big companies, Microsoft’s, McKinsey, Google… people recognize those names. People recognize names of companies in big cities. Someone doesn’t recognize the name of a company in Kenya or a company in Ethiopia. So companies are reticent to hire people whose experience they don’t understand, whose qualifications they don’t recognize.
As the Na’amal agency, we’re the intermediary. We become that trusted body. So companies come to us and say, “We need this person to do this piece of work. We need this piece of work done.” So the agency is how we accumulate, how we gather, compile pieces of work for talent. So we have a couple of talent working directly for companies.
So we have a B2B relationship with a client; they pay us, we pay the talent. Or the other way we work is you have a piece of work you want to outsource. You would outsource it anyway. So instead of outsourcing it to someone in your city, you outsource it to us. We build the team of refugees who we’ve trained to deliver that product to you. So for us, that was one of the biggest innovations we’ve done.
Again, we’re constantly innovating. Another issue we saw was that we wanted to do something to differentiate, you know, what Na’amal does. So one of our colleagues, he finished his masters recently. He got funding from his university to build a product for his organization. And again we looked around and we said, “okay, like what does the world look like?”
So he built this tool for us to assess how websites need to be optimized for AI. You know, so it’s a great tool even without Na’amal being directly involved. Like “great, I’ve got a website I know that it’s visible on Google, but it’s not visible on ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini. How can I optimize our website for this?” Because people are searching for AI tools for recommendations [more] than Google. I mean, I hardly use Google these days to search for something. I use an AI tool. So we built this tool.
But the idea is, this is how we provide work for our refugees. Because this tool was built with refugees supporting the development, even though it’s led by our colleague, refugees supporting the development. But it was made so that refugees can do the changes to the website. So, building a tool that can be independent, but linking the refugee journey and experience to the tool that we’ve built.
Melissa: Very cool. I’m going to have to check that one out.
Lorraine: Yeah, you must.
Melissa: Another important kind of part of this ecosystem and something we really emphasize at New Tactics is collaboration amongst partners. So, can you tell me a little bit about the organizations you’ve collaborated with and how those partnerships have enhanced your impact?
Lorraine: Yeah. So, we believe in partnerships. We really believe that you can’t do anything on your own. And interestingly, you know, with my academic, my research hat, often you’re told you have to do single-authored papers, you have to do everything on your own. But when I realized how much more enjoyable and how much better it is when you write, you know, with a team, there’s no looking back.
And for us, it’s been the same experience working at Na’amal with working with partners. We can significantly multiply our impact. And we have multiple different partners. So we call our donors, our donors are also our partners because they’re invested in us. They’re investing in us and investing with us in the talent that we’re supporting.
So we have amazing donors from multiple countries who we love a lot. I’ll give an example of the Conrad Hilton Foundation. They funded us for the last two years, and we just started our third year, but it’s a multi-year funding. So you know, we appreciate the trust they put in us to invest in the talent for three more years.
We work with other NGOs, again on the ground to support the work that we’re doing. In Kenya. We work with an organization called Konexio Africa, again, to support refugees seeking employment. We have many research collaborations as well. Right now, we’re building new partnerships to do more. In the past, we were funded by the ILO [International Labour Organization]; they weren’t just a donor, they were a partner for us. We really worked together to do the work that we tried to do.
We were funded by the World Bank to do a research project, and again it was a real partnership, trying to figure out and getting constant feedback from them all the time. So these donors have become partners.
And as well when we implement, there are many partners we work with. We work with refugee organizations on the ground, because they’re close to the communities. We work with refugee organizations to help with the recruitment of talent, to help with screening. And moving forward, we’ll be working with refugee organizations to build capacity, so that they can then do what we do.
So for us, scale is replication, not just us doing everything. How can we train others to do what we do to scale the work? My big dream, one of the goals—I’m not sure if it’ll happen this year, but if there are any donors out there—we want to incubate a refugee-led organization. This way, we support refugees to start an organization and again give them the training so they can do what we do. We can partner with them. We can direct donors to them. We really want to incubate an organization so that again we can scale the work that needs to be done.
Melissa: Yeah. And scale the impact.
Lorraine: Exactly.
Melissa: Let’s talk about that a little bit. So what does impact look like for you guys, and how do you measure it in the lives of refugee learners in their communities?
Lorraine: Yeah. So, as an organization focusing on livelihoods for us, jobs are important. And not just if someone gets a job for one month, getting paid $500, and then doesn’t do any more for the next three years, that’s not a job.
We want consistent, sustainable, dignified, and fulfilling work. So, for us, impact is: “Do they earn enough to look after their families?” So, yes, the job is important, but we want to make sure that they earn enough to look after their families. Do they earn enough so their kids can go to school, and the kids can have books? Do they earn enough so the family can have good healthcare? So for us, impact is beyond the numerical value of the money they earn. Impact is how they’re able to support their families and their communities.
We also measure impact in: have they been able to build other companies to then hire more people? One of our alumni, a refugee, she built—after she’s been through our program and worked with the Na’amal Agency—she built a gaming studio in Kakuma refugee camp to then give back to the community. So for us, impact is beyond “I earn this amount of money.” For us, impact is how is the money that they’re earning supports themselves, their families, their extended family, and the community.
Melissa: Yeah. It comes full circle back to that, all the knock-on effects of having that right to dignified work, right? And how it helps individuals fulfill many of their other human rights.
Lorraine: Yeah. And you mentioned earlier about how we often think of humanitarian assistance as providing food and shelter, but for me, jobs come first before even this. Yes, we need food and shelter for the beginning, but giving food and shelter indefinitely is not sustainable. How can you give that person the tools so they can earn the money so they can then provide their own food and shelter? And that’s the most sustainable model. Not providing it indefinitely, but giving them the tools so they can look after it. That means they have agency. They feel better about themselves because they aren’t relying on someone else to provide everything. They’re looking after themselves and their family.
And often we think about education for children as hugely important. Yes, it is. But if parents don’t have agency, if they don’t have a way for them to feel like they’re contributing, they can’t support their child’s education. They need to have a way so they can look after themselves, look after their families, and then the child will do much better in school.
Melissa: Thank you for that reframing. It really does more to solve the problem from the root of the problem, right?
Lorraine: Yes. Yes.
Melissa: Of course, this work is happening within systems that weren’t necessarily designed to make these pathways easy, right? So, can you talk about any particular challenges you’ve faced, whether that be systemic barriers to refugee employment or, on a more individual level, like resistance to change? What are the challenges that you’ve encountered?
Lorraine: So, from the systemic level, in many countries that refugees live, they don’t have the right to work. The laws change constantly in many countries. So, whilst countries are implementing laws to facilitate refugee access to local labor markets, some of the changes are still quite slow. Or even if it’s written in law, implementation is always an issue.
But I have to say, whilst we often think that European and American countries are the best at this, they are not. In Uganda, for example, when refugees arrive in Uganda, they automatically have the right to work. They can automatically send their kids to school and be given a bit of land. So, this is a country which is very poor, but they recognize that by giving refugees the means to look after themselves, it’s much more sustainable than sort of gathering them in a place and letting them wallow in poverty.
So, a big challenge is government. The narrative that people have, which is allowing governments to become much more dogmatic, much more punitive toward refugees. And it’s happening across Europe. It’s happening in America. The sort of closing of doors. But I do wonder, when people in the global north need to move, who’s going to open the doors to them if they behave this way? And as we’ve seen, things can happen so quickly which are unexpected. So I think legal challenges remain an issue. And you know with the current swing toward, I don’t want to be political, with the current swing toward being much more right-wing governments…
Melissa: You can say fascism.
Lorraine: Yes, toward fascism. Thank you, Melissa. Thank you. Let me say it. You know, with this current swing toward that, it’s making it much more difficult. And you know things like connectivity, the right to work, as you say, as I said earlier, documentation—these are all challenges, but these can be overcome by the government.
Another challenge, and I guess this is not just for refugees, this is for everyone—the economies are changing so quickly. I mean, right now, what’s happening in the world in the Middle East is crippling global economies, with the threats of crippling banks; it’s going to be tough not just for refugees, but it will be tough for everyone. And it’s going to be interesting to see who are the ones that are able to overcome and succeed. Because there are always people that are able to succeed.
And my theory is that those who’ve had to face the most hardship previously are the ones who come out as victors. The ones who’ve had to struggle to make things work for themselves—for them, this is just another part of the struggle, and they will emerge much more successful because they’ve built that resilience, even though I hate that word resilience—they’ve built that ability to navigate complex situations to navigate chaos.
Melissa: Yeah, I certainly hope that that is the case. Okay. You mentioned AI. There’s like this interesting internal conflict that I have with AI, and I wonder if you have that too.
Lorraine: Yes.
Melissa: Yeah. It’s such a, you know, the global labor market has shifted so much towards that. And at the same time, I think in the human rights world, like we rightly have suspicion of, like the risks and the regulations that are needed around AI. How do you see it as an opportunity, as a risk, or as both for refugee communities?
Lorraine: I see the opportunity. Yes, there is risk, but I see the opportunity.
And the two of us, as first-language speakers, recognize that we have the advantage of being able to navigate systems and structures built for native English speakers. With AI, a lot of this can be overcome. So, this is one thing I’m super grateful about.
I often see my colleagues writing much better external emails because they have AI, and I completely applaud that. I see the refugees being able to build quicker, much more efficiently because they use AI to help them with their code, to help them with the development of their tech skills. And they aren’t only consuming AI, they’re building AI systems. And for me, this is the change I want to see: I want to see them being producers of AI, not just consumers of AI.
Yes, the concern is there, but I really believe the concern can be addressed by public pressure. There’s a big campaign now to boycott ChatGPT because of the CEO’s behavior, and I really believe that public pressure can influence people like that to change their behavior. So the risks I see are there. Yes, there’s job displacement with AI, and all it means is that we have to rapidly upskill people so that they can then continue to work in skills that AI is replacing. But some research recently showed that instead of AI displacing jobs, employers want people with AI skills. And people with AI skills have a hiring premium compared to those without any AI skills. So people who put AI on their CVs, whether it’s self-taught, whether it’s an AI from LinkedIn or from a company, people with these skills have a hiring premium.
So we need to ensure that the people that we train have these skills. They can go to an employer and say, “I can use these AIs. I can build with AI. I’m not just a consumer. I’m a producer of AI.I’m a producer with AI and of AI systems.” And this is where I see the opportunity. Yes, you know, we have to be concerned about the risks, but I really do feel that there’s so much opportunity. I do feel we can mitigate the risks if we force the people running the AI companies, the CEOs, into better behavior.
Melissa: Yeah. And I appreciate that kind of narrative shift, too, of—you hear so much about job displacement, but you don’t think of like it as actually a skill that’s been a positive addition to your workers. So, that’s amazing to hear.
Lorraine: Exactly.
Melissa: Okay. So, as we kind of start to wrap up, let’s take a look forward. You guys are a pretty young organization. You’ve been around five or six years. What’s in the next five years for Na’amal?
Lorraine: Yeah. So, we want to scale to other countries. So, right now, we work in Kenya, Ethiopia, and Uganda. We want to scale to other countries in Africa. We want to go back to the Middle East.
So, we have some ongoing discussions about scaling to other countries. We’ll continue to do research, research on AI to understand how job displacement affects the people that we work with. We want to continue with our advocacy. Advocacy is hugely important. We want—you know, we have newsletters, we’ve got a podcast, we want to host conferences. We really want to do stuff to show that the narrative can be shifted.
Not just to shift it, but to show beyond because I often find, and I’m sure you find this when you talk about human rights. We often speak in echo chambers. The people we speak to are people who already believe what we’re saying. How can we get this podcast, how can we get the work that we do beyond our echo chambers? Beyond people who already support the work that we do, who already believe in what we believe in? And I think that’s the really hard thing to do. That’s where the real shift happens if we can find people who are not within our systems to hear our message.
I think as we move forward, we really want to see how we can push that narrative forward. And again, as I said in partnerships, this is not just us. This is a communal thing. This is going to be done in partnership.
Melissa: Yeah. You mentioned some resources that you guys have, the conferences, the podcast. Do you want to plug in, like where listeners can find you and support your work?
Lorraine: Yeah. So, on our website, if you want to donate, we have our donate button. We have our podcast. It’s on Spotify and all the other regular streams. We have three or four newsletters a year. So, again, subscribe to our newsletter, see the work that we’re doing, but also more importantly, follow us on LinkedIn, follow us on Instagram. See the work that we’re doing.
We always showcase what our talent’s doing. We celebrate the people who have been through our programs and are achieving. We celebrate those who are emerging, who are yet to achieve. We really celebrate the people that we work with. So follow us, hear our stories. On our podcast, we feature the stories of our participants. So, really, to get an understanding of the people we work with. Yeah. Follow us and consume what we produce.
And we also do a lot of blogs and articles, academic stuff, yes, some reports which you don’t necessarily need to read, but we have a lot of evidence out there to show how the work that we do really makes a difference.
Melissa: Thank you for sharing that, and I’ll be sure to link all of those things in the show notes for the episode. I appreciate you so much and all the work that you do. So, thanks for joining me.
Lorraine: Thanks, Melissa. It was great fun.
Thank you for listening to this episode of Human Rights Chat by New Tactics in Human Rights, where we inspire and equip activists to change the world. I’m grateful to Lorraine for sharing her insights and for the work she does to expand access to dignified employment for refugee communities.
This episode is dedicated to the advocates, educators, and community leaders working to ensure that the right to work is recognized as a fundamental human right for all.
If this conversation resonated with you, consider sharing this episode and exploring ways to support this work, including resources from Na’amal in the show notes.
Thanks for listening.
