If immigrants across the EU were as active in self-employment as 30-49 year old native-born men, there would be an additional 1.3 million self-employed immigrants (OCDE, The Missing Entrepreneurs 2023). Migrants indisputably contribute greatly to both their origin and their destination countries, yet they face heavy barriers to reach their full potential as entrepreneurs.
Today is International Migrant Day, and we want to highlight the profiles of people, migrant or with cross-cultural background, whose projects are fostering a more inclusive society.
Kirstie Angstmann
Kristie is an elected member of the Migrants board council of the city of Freiburg (Germany), and a is a member of the Women’s Commission of the same city.
She is also a Board member of AIM FOUNDATION Freiburg, member of the planning committee of the African Kiss Festival Freiburg, a former member of the arterial Network Africa and AccraCan, and the initiator of Migrant Women in Focus, an annual forum for migrant women.
She is also an active member of various feminist and political initiatives in Freiburg and former programme Assistant at the cultural department at the Goethe-Institut e.V. in Ghana.
She is committed to the norm of acceptance, equal educational opportunities for all, especially for women:
“When I ran for the Migrants Advisory Board, one of my key manifesto points was education and saying no to racism. As a mother of African origin, even though I am a naturalised German and my husband is a native German, my daughter faced racism in kindergarten. She was ridiculed for her hair and skin color, which made her question her identity. At just five years old, she asked me, Mama, who am I? Where do I belong? That question broke my heart, but it also woke me up. So I told her, Your hair is special—you can make it straight like theirs, but they can’t make theirs like yours. That makes you unique. As mothers with migrant backgrounds, it’s essential to instil confidence in our children because they endure so much due to racism.”
Shaza Alrihawi
Shaza is the co-founder of Global Independent Refugee Women Leaders (GIRWL), the The Network for Refugee Voices (NRV) and the Global Refugee-led Network (GRN).
Shaza Alrihawi’s career started with the UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency in Syria, where she handled cases of sexual and gender-based violence. Since 2017, she has been a research associate at the LIfBi – Leibniz Institute for Educational Trajectories (LIfBi) in Germany. Shaza co-founded several organizations and is dedicated to promoting the participation rights of refugees. She represents various global and regional refugee initiatives, contributes to numerous reports, and has been a prominent panellist at renown platforms like the Refugee Studies Centre, University of Oxford. When asked about the biggest obstacles for refugee women to participate in European democratic spaces, Shaza said:
“The intersection of systemic barriers, such as language challenges, limited access to information about political processes, and the ongoing struggle to meet basic needs while navigating complex asylum systems.”
Raquel Barbosa Jacob
Raquel Barbosa, a Spanish entrepreneur of African descent who owns a culinary business: La Culpa es del Coulant (Blame it on the Coulant)
La Culpa es del Coulant is an online and offline platform that promotes and educates about one of the world’s richest and most diverse yet least known cuisines and its influence, the gastronomy of the African continent.
Its main purpose is to impact both economically and socially the African and Afro-descendant communities within and outside the continent.
They create educational and valuable content through various digital platforms, host culinary events in different cities, promote food brands and businesses, and organise culinary trips to Africa and the diaspora.
Teresa Buczkowska
Teresa, originally from Poland and now residing in Ireland, founded Migrant Vote to share her expertise in promoting migrant electoral participation and to create a theoretical framework for universal voting rights for migrants. She recently won Women of Europe Awards 2024 in the Women in Media category. She has worked on projects to facilitate migrant political and electoral leadership at the Immigrant Council of Ireland.
