Last year, 5.4 million people were forced to flee and seek safety in other countries, according to the UN’s Refugee Agency, with seven in 10 refugees originating from just six countries. Today, one in every 70 people globally is forcibly displaced.
Displacement doesn’t just mean losing homes, loved ones and communities — it also means losing careers and watching hard-won skills atrophy.
Only 11% of refugees can easily certify the academic and professional credentials they earned back home, according to a 2022 World Bank–UNHCR Joint Data Center report. And in the US alone, an estimated 2 million college-educated immigrants were unemployed or working well below their skill level in 2019, according to the Migration Policy Institute; something researchers have called “brain waste.”
So a software engineer from Damascus or a marketer from Kyiv can arrive in a new country and find that, professionally, they need to start back at square one.
Employers, meanwhile, insist they can’t find people. In ManpowerGroup’s 2026 Talent Shortage Survey of some 39,000 employers across 41 countries, 72% reported difficulty filling roles.
EqualReach, a business-to-business (B2B) marketplace founded in 2023, is built on the premise that the two sides of the labor market can come together in a win-win for both.
Crucially, EqualReach doesn’t employ the workers or place individuals into client companies. Clients procure services from a refugee-led agency the way they would from any vendor, rather than navigating the visa sponsorship, credential recognition and work-permit hurdles that come with hiring displaced individuals directly.
Finding the inspiration
The company’s origin story dates back a decade before its founding. After graduating from college, Giselle Gonzales spent five years working on travel with National Geographic and Disney, while moonlighting for nonprofits and social enterprises. She reported on the ongoing struggles of refugees traveling Europe’s refugee route — the corridor from Greece toward northern Europe that millions have walked since the Syrian civil war.
“I was brought on to travel from Greece to Germany through seven countries, documenting the realities of what was happening,” Gonzales says, recalling the mass migration of Syrian refugees into Europe. She used social media, blogs, photography and video to communicate what she saw on the ground.
It was during this assignment that she encountered a wave of technologists and entrepreneurs using apps and digital tools to respond to the humanitarian crisis in nontraditional ways — an approach she found herself drawn to.
She joined a Germany-based team building an app to help refugees navigate the basics of settling into new countries, before she went on to pursue graduate research into digital work among refugee populations.
Connecting jobs with people who need them
The more she studied the issue, the more one obstacle kept resurfacing: “If job creation was going to happen, you needed businesses involved in creating jobs for refugees,” she says. But access to digital banking and other opportunities hinged on major tech providers, who were “either allow-listing or block-listing those for entire nations.”
Her observation matches the data: the Joint Data Center found that just 2% of refugees live in countries with adequate access to formal financial services, meaning that even a displaced person with in-demand skills and a laptop may have no way to get paid.
“I started to see how much power sits within the tech sector, and how much opportunity there is to drive real impact if you can work within the system, rather than being the small guy throwing a pebble at a wall,” Gonzales says.
“Once I was inside, I realized I could drive real influence.” She smiles. “And that pebble I’d been throwing became a boulder.”
“The refugee crisis is growing, and I think from my experience and the rooms I can access, I am well equipped to help move that boulder from within the tech community.”
Building EqualReach
That boulder became the cornerstone for EqualReach, which Gonzales launched in September 2023, with its first client project following that December.
She credits Beth Knight, who led social sustainability at Lloyds Banking Group, and headed Amazon’s mobilization effort for Ukraine at the start of the war, as a key mentor who encouraged her to make the leap from a secure tech job and launch EqualReach.
The company operates as a B2B marketplace, matching companies with vetted “delivery partner” teams — refugee-led businesses, agency spinoffs and nonprofit-linked collectives — specializing in services such as digital marketing, app development and AI integration. EqualReach now works with teams in more than 15 countries, according to Gonzales.
“We built out this network of delivery partners,” Gonzales says, describing a vetting process designed to give clients confidence in the quality of the match.
Early on, the company handled contracts, invoicing and payments manually, she says, “so we could really understand the ins and outs of what a client needs to make this as easy a yes as possible.”
The process now works like this: A client submits a project brief, and EqualReach shortlists one to three vetted teams, who submit free custom proposals. The client compares budgets, timelines and approach, then signs on and pays via a single link — with no cost until then. The relationship remains B2B from start to finish.
“It’s trying to make it as easy as possible, but also a delight to use,” Gonzales said.
Every completed project comes with an impact report showing the number of jobs created and the percentage of workers who are women, from local communities or from displaced communities.
“Even something not exciting, like procurement,” Gonzales said, “that too can be driving significant social impact.”
A recent project
Among the company’s recent work is a project for a German multinational that needed an internal announcement video to reach roughly 80,000 employees worldwide.
EqualReach matched the company with a female-led Palestinian marketing team based in the West Bank, which built a fully AI-generated video using voice clips and photos from the client’s own staff — with AI persona technology developed by a designer in Gaza.
“There were so many … innovative technologies that were used,” Gonzales said. “It was just kind of a win-win-win for everyone along the value chain.”
The case for urgency
Gonzales points to the scale of global displacement to make the business case for her work.
The number of forcibly displaced people worldwide has nearly doubled over the past decade, to 117.8 million at the end of 2025, per the UN Refugee Agency. And while last year saw the first decline in 10 years as refugees returned to Syria, Sudan and elsewhere, she and others expect displacement to accelerate as climate change adds to displacement driven by conflict.
At the same time, 63% of employers say skills gaps are the biggest barrier to business transformation, according to the World Economic Forum.
Even more reason, Gonzales argues, that “it makes business sense to include displaced talent.”
Businesses large and small may not be accustomed to the typical hurdles of refugee employees and relationships— work permits, visas, foreign credentials, cross-border payments.
But most small businesses—including those in the United Kingdom, where EqualReach is headquartered — are accustomed to working with freelancers and contractors.
“We are tapping into existing behavior,” Gonzales says. “We are just providing a streamlined way to work with contractors, to work with agencies, in a way that is also driving significant social impact while meeting all the same business objectives that a company would have.”