By Kuol Malou
Economic empowerment is often described as an individual journey. Get qualified. Find work. Start a business. Build a network. Learn how the system operates.
There is truth in that advice, but it can obscure how economic participation actually works. People do not build livelihoods in isolation. They do so through relationships with employers, customers, banks, governments, educational institutions, professional networks and communities. Opportunity depends partly on individual effort, but it also depends on whether the surrounding system is accessible.
For migrants building lives in Australia, that distinction matters.
Australian Bureau of Statistics data released in 2026 showed that permanent migrants were slightly more likely than the wider working-age population to receive income from their own unincorporated businesses. Among humanitarian migrants who had lived in Australia for more than a decade, the proportion was higher again.
The figures tell us that entrepreneurship is already part of migrant economic participation. They do not, however, tell us enough about what happens after a business is created.
A person can have a viable idea, trusted relationships within their community and the willingness to work, yet still struggle to reach customers outside that network. A business can be respected locally while remaining disconnected from procurement opportunities, finance, professional advice or mainstream distribution. An entrepreneur may understand their market intimately while having little access to the institutions that influence whether that business can grow.
This is where the conversation about economic empowerment needs to become more sophisticated.
The question is not simply how we help more migrants start businesses. It is how we build the connections that allow skills, knowledge, relationships and enterprise to move across the boundaries between communities and institutions.
Social enterprise offers one useful way of thinking about that problem.
Lived experience is also economic knowledge
Social enterprise combines commercial activity with a social purpose. In migrant and refugee communities, its value can extend beyond employment or revenue.
A community-based enterprise often understands things that are difficult to see from the outside.
It may know why a newly arrived woman is hesitant to enter a particular workplace. It may understand why a government program that appears accessible on paper has struggled to attract participants. It may know why someone with years of overseas experience cannot translate that experience into an Australian employment pathway, or why a capable entrepreneur remains dependent on customers from within their own cultural community.
We often describe this knowledge as lived experience. The phrase is useful, but it can make the knowledge sound softer than it is.
Lived experience can also be operational knowledge.
It can reveal where a system becomes difficult to navigate, where communication breaks down, where trust is missing and where services have been designed around assumptions that do not hold in practice.
That has economic value.
Consider the difference between knowing that employment participation is low and knowing why an individual repeatedly withdraws from recruitment. One is a statistic. The other may reveal problems involving childcare, transport, recognition of overseas qualifications, confidence, unfamiliar workplace expectations, discrimination or a referral process that nobody has properly explained.
Institutions need the first kind of information. They also need the second.
Too often, the two sit in different rooms.
The problem is often the distance between systems
Australia does not lack organisations working on migrant employment, entrepreneurship or economic participation.
Governments fund programs. Councils run business initiatives. Universities produce research. Employment providers offer pathways. Financial institutions provide products. Businesses need workers and suppliers. Community organisations work directly with families and individuals.
The difficulty is that these activities do not always connect.
A community organisation may know that people are struggling to find employment, while an employer several kilometres away cannot fill vacancies. A university may have strong research explaining a barrier, while the program intended to address that barrier operates without reference to it. A government agency may have funding available, while the people it hopes to reach do not trust or understand the pathway into the program.
Meanwhile, a migrant entrepreneur may know exactly what people in their community need but have no relationship with the institution that has the resources to respond.
Everyone can be active around the same problem without forming a functioning system.
This is where the concept of collective impact becomes useful.
Collective impact is sometimes reduced to partnership language: organisations meeting, sharing logos on a flyer or signing an agreement. Its original meaning is much more demanding. It requires organisations working on the same complex problem to establish a shared understanding of that problem, agree on how progress will be measured, contribute different but complementary activities, communicate consistently and maintain enough coordination to keep the work aligned.
Applied to migrant economic participation, the model becomes practical.
Community organisations contribute trusted relationships and knowledge of local conditions. Migrants and entrepreneurs bring direct experience of navigating systems. Employers bring jobs, contracts and market access. Universities contribute research and evaluation. Government brings policy, public investment and institutional reach. Financial institutions provide capital and financial infrastructure.
No single participant needs to do everything.
The value lies in connecting what each already knows and controls.
Migrant-led social enterprise can occupy an important position within that network because it can translate between worlds that do not always communicate well.
Translation is part of economic infrastructure
Translation in this context is not simply about language.
Economic systems contain their own vocabulary, expectations and unwritten rules.
How does procurement work? What does an employer expect in an interview? Why does a bank require particular documents? What insurance does a small business need? How do government tenders work? How should a service be priced? How does an entrepreneur find customers outside their immediate network? How is overseas experience translated into something Australian employers recognise?
People who have spent their lives inside these systems can forget how much knowledge they have accumulated simply by being familiar with them.
For someone entering the system later, the rules can be difficult to see.
Australian refugee-employment programs have recognised the importance of this type of navigation. Evaluations have described providers helping participants understand workplace expectations and rights, administrative requirements for starting businesses and pathways between different services.
That work may look like mentoring, orientation or case management. Economically, however, it performs another function: it reduces the distance between a person and an opportunity.
Institutions need translation in the opposite direction as well.
Governments need to understand why programs with sound intentions may not be trusted. Employers need to understand how standard recruitment practices can overlook capable candidates. Funders need to distinguish between a community failing to engage and a program failing to reach the community. Business advisers need to recognise that advice designed for an entrepreneur with established credit, networks and familiarity with Australian institutions may not transfer neatly to someone starting from a different position.
A healthy economic ecosystem allows information to travel in both directions.
That is why lived experience should not be treated as something collected at the end of a consultation. If it is valuable enough to request, it should be valuable enough to influence design.
Consultation is not shared ownership
There is a familiar pattern in community engagement.
An institution develops a program, strategy or policy. People with lived experience are then invited into a room to comment on it. Their views are recorded, a consultation report is produced and the institution moves on.
Consultation has value. It can identify problems and improve decisions.
But consultation and shared ownership are not the same thing.
Shared ownership does not require community organisations to become government departments or people with lived experience to become policy specialists. It means allowing knowledge from different parts of a system to affect what the system actually does.
That includes how services are designed, how resources are allocated, how success is measured and what happens when an approach is not working.
The test should be practical.
Did somebody enter employment? Did a business reach a new market? Did an entrepreneur win a contract? Did an employer change a recruitment practice? Did a referral pathway result in a service being used? Did an institution change its approach after hearing evidence from the people affected by it?
Attendance is not an outcome. Neither is agreement in principle.
Economic participation becomes meaningful when relationships produce movement.
From grant recipient to economic partner
Procurement is one area where this shift becomes especially visible.
Governments, universities, corporations and other large institutions spend enormous amounts of money purchasing goods and services. Social procurement asks what happens when some of that spending is directed towards businesses that also produce a social benefit.
Social Traders reports that Australian businesses and governments have spent more than $1.4 billion with certified social enterprises since 2018. Whatever the precise model used, the principle deserves attention.
Sometimes the most useful thing an institution can give an emerging enterprise is not a grant.
It is a customer.
A contract can provide revenue, credibility, experience and relationships. It can allow a business to employ someone else, invest in equipment, improve systems or compete for larger work.
For migrant-led social enterprises, that creates a fundamentally different relationship with institutions.
Community stops being understood only as a group requiring assistance. It also becomes a source of suppliers, employers, advisers, producers and commercial partners.
That shift matters because economic empowerment should ultimately reduce dependency on temporary programs rather than reproduce it.
The aim is not another migrant economy
There is also a risk in this discussion.
Strong community networks can create opportunity, but they can also become boundaries.
A migrant business that finds its first customers through cultural relationships should not be expected to remain economically confined to that community. A social enterprise can retain a strong community purpose while selling to government, corporations or mainstream consumers. An entrepreneur should not have to choose between cultural connection and participation in the wider economy.
The objective should therefore not be the creation of a separate migrant economy operating alongside the mainstream one.
It should be stronger bridges into the wider economy.
That means access to finance, procurement, professional networks, customers, research, institutional relationships and the informal knowledge that often determines who can navigate those systems successfully.
Community trust is an asset. It should become a foundation for expansion rather than a boundary around opportunity.
Economic empowerment is relational
There is a tendency to tell economic success stories backwards.
Once someone has established a business, secured a job or achieved financial independence, the result is often attributed to individual determination.
Determination matters. So does the environment around it.
Somebody explained an unfamiliar process. Someone made an introduction. A customer took a chance. An employer recognised potential. A mentor shared knowledge. A community provided trust. A network expanded. Capital became available. An institution removed a barrier.
Those relationships do not diminish individual achievement. They help explain how achievement becomes possible.
For migrant communities, the opportunity is to make those connections less accidental.
Social enterprise can help do that because it can sit close enough to communities to understand lived realities while also operating in the economic world of customers, contracts and institutions.
But social enterprise alone is not enough.
The larger opportunity is to build an ecosystem in which government, business, education, finance, community organisations and migrant entrepreneurs understand the problem they are trying to solve, know what each can contribute and have some way of judging whether their combined effort is producing results.
That is the useful promise of collective impact.
Not more organisations doing more things.
Better connections between the things already being done.
Economic empowerment becomes more durable when lived experience can shape institutions, institutional opportunity can reach communities, and communities are recognised not merely as recipients of economic policy but as participants in building the economy itself.
