How sustainable investing aims to address the refugee crisis

UN Ambassador to Africa Ger Duany and Newday Impact CEO Doug Heske will attend the Yahoo Finance Live panel to discuss how sustainable investing works to solve the refugee crisis.

Video transcript

AKIKO FUJITA: Well, the COVID-19 pandemic may have restricted freedom of movement around the world, but the UN reports that the number of refugees last year hit a new post World War II record, with a total of 82 million displaced. And that number has doubled in just a decade. The fintech platform Newday Impact wants to fight the crisis through sustainable investments by entering into a partnership with the UN ambassador for Africa before World Refugee Day.

Let’s bring our two guests here. Ger Duany is the UN ambassador for Africa. We also have Doug Heske, the CEO of Newday Impact. Nice to talk to you both. Ger, I want to start with your story. You have also spoken a lot about displaced family members. But if you look at that total number that the UN has named, 82 million people, what has accelerated that number?

GERMANY: Well, first of all I want to thank you for being here. And yes, of course, as a former refugee who arrives in the US very early, I understood the refugees’ situation very well. Because I lived in many different refugee camps in East Africa before I came to the United States. So I lived in Kenya, in Ethiopia. And later I found a way to get to the United States.

When my new country was plunged into civil war in 2015, I had to join the UNHCR to share my story on my platform so that the plight of the refugees can be viewed very closely. It is for this reason that I have served as the UNHCR Goodwill Ambassador to East and throughout Africa.

ZACK GUZMAN: And Doug, I mean, we talked about your platform. We talked years ago about Newday Impact and the way it is helping investors use their money when it comes to ocean health, climate protection, and now the refugee crisis. I mean, what are the effects of these investments, how are they directly helping the refugee crisis here? And how does it all work on Newday?

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DOUG HESKE: Yes, Zack, thank you. Nice to see you again. So when we talk about sustainability and a healthy planet, we cannot talk about both without talking about healthy humanity. And this expression was coined by Jacques Cousteau, one of the fathers of the sustainability movement.

There could be no better example of the link between humanity and climate change than the refugee crisis. If you look at the numbers, as Akiko previously said, they are absolutely mind-boggling. So we try to give individuals and institutions the opportunity to get involved not only with the refugee crisis, but also with all these really important sustainability issues, be it the ocean, clean water or refugees.

So what we do at Newday is to give people and institutions the opportunity to get involved, to find out more, to get involved and maybe, and above all, to invest behind these things. There is some really amazing work going on today and a lot, very much [AUDIO OUT] Attributes associated with the crisis. Organizations like Unilever, which own Ben & Jerry’s, invest heavily in refugee employment. There are other organizations around the world like Microsoft that are taking or are taking great initiatives to engage people in the community so that they can be better integrated into the communities they go into.

AKIKO FUJITA: So Doug, the idea here is to invest in companies that have these types of programs in place?

DOUG HESKE: Yes, the idea is really three things. That we need to better educate the world about it [AUDIO OUT] this crisis. So, as I said, as you said, the numbers are staggering. 80 million people, that’s roughly the size of Germany today, the population of Germany. More importantly, it is estimated that by the turn of the century, around 750 million people could be displaced by 2100. There are potentially more than a billion infants who may be born in an undernourished environment.

That’s why we want people to get an education. We also want them to get involved. We want them to use their voice to advocate change in business organizations to encourage them to hire more people. And we want them to be invested. So invest in public organizations that are doing this really, really good job. And this is a powerful movement right now that has emerged from this younger generation that is making change faster than anyone else today. So for us everything revolves around collective action. And that is very much a collective action problem. We need to involve more people in this change. There’s a lot more information that people can get by going straight to the Newday website or downloading the Newday mobile app.

AKIKO FUJITA: And, Ger, when you think of the UN’s outlook on this crisis, it doesn’t look particularly optimistic. You have also spoken a lot about displacement as a result of climate change. And I wonder if you can address some of these other factors that you think could really add to what is already a major crisis. We’re talking 82 million now. What are the other factors that need to be addressed to keep the number down?

GERMANY: Well, in the case of refugees, especially in the eastern Horn of Africa, the place is completely dominated by refugees, especially in my country, South Sudan, which is currently generating three million refugees living in Uganda, Kenya and Ethiopia. And even if you think of Ethiopia, the current conflicts between Ethiopia and Tigray generate millions of refugees living in Sudan.

And then all of East Africa, there is always a high risk place where people are being displaced. And sometimes when the borders are closed to refugees it becomes very difficult for them to really settle down. I think then international law should really come into play so that refugees can be protected before they really lose hope and then no longer know what to do. So these are the things that I have seen in East Africa for a long time, yes.

AKIKO FUJITA: There is certainly an important discussion to be had here. And I want to thank you both for joining us today. Ger Duany, UN Ambassador for Africa, and Doug Heske, CEO of Newday Impact.

source https://dailyhealthynews.ca/how-sustainable-investing-aims-to-address-the-refugee-crisis/