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Employment

Changemakers: Mursal Hedayat's Chatterbox is transforming refugee employment

Chatterbox connects underutilised talent with the growing demand for language skills

This week’s Changemakers Top 100 special edition features the world’s leading thinkers, shakers and agitators. Throughout the week we’ll be highlighting just a few online.

Hedayat came to the UK from Afghanistan as a refugee in 1994. Her mother, a civil engineer fluent in four languages, struggled to find work in her field after obtaining refugee status.

Hers is not a unique problem. A Deloitte report from 2017 found 38 per cent of Syrian refugees in Britain had a university education, yet the refugee unemployment rate sits at around 70 per cent. Hedayat set up Chatterbox, an organisation connecting underutilised talent with a growing demand for language skills by training and employing displaced people to teach their native language using an online platform, transforming their employment prospects.

wearechatterbox.org

Read the full article in this week's Big Issue.
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