(Illustration by Mitch Blunt) 

The terrorist attacks that struck Brussels on March 22, 2016, threw a spotlight on a persistent but growing social problem: Young people whose families come from other parts of the world often struggle to find a place in the social and economic life of that city. Their sense of isolation is especially acute when they try to enter the city’s job market. Among 28 European Union countries, according to a recent report by the European Commission, Belgium has the second-highest employment gap between native residents and non-European migrants. In neighborhoods of Brussels that are home to many low-skilled young people with a migrant background, the unemployment rate ranges from 60 percent to 70 percent. These neighborhoods have become breeding grounds of economic despair, sociocultural alienation, and—in some tragic cases—political radicalism.

Like many European countries, moreover, Belgium has recently experienced an unprecedented wave of migration. Since the summer of 2015, between 20,000 and 30,000 refugee candidates have arrived in Belgium, and most of them come from wartorn countries such as Syria. Young people make up a large portion of this population.

Improving the socioeconomic integration of young adults with a migrant background has therefore become a leading policy objective for Belgian government officials. “The refugee crisis forces us to find innovative and efficient solutions. Accessing the job market will have a positive impact on [migrants’] overall integration in society,” said Didier Gosuin, minister of economy and employment for the Brussels region, in a speech last year to the Brussels parliament.

Duo for a Job, a nonprofit organization based in Brussels, helps young migrants make their way through the city’s job market. Two of us (Le Grelle and Simonart) cofounded the organization in 2012; the other coauthor (Dermine) serves as an adviser to the group. Our core intervention is a program that enables intercultural and intergenerational job coaching: We pair young migrant workers with older native Belgians who serve as career mentors. Xavier, for instance, is a 69-yearold retired health-care professional who worked with Ali, a 26-year-old nurse from Gaza. “The Duo for a Job team structured an intensive six-month mentoring process in which I helped Ali in his efforts to find a job in a hospital,” Xavier explains. The formal mentoring period lasts for half a year, but some participants develop enduring friendships.

To help fund Duo for a Job, we are using a pay-for-success approach that will require us to subject our program to rigorous evaluation later this year. But the program has already shown promising results: To date, we have arranged coaching for more than 300 young migrants in Brussels, and 44 percent of these participants were able to find a long-term position within their six-month mentoring period—a figure that is twice as high as the six-month jobplacement rate for other members of this population. This data point validates our belief that a lack of social capital, rather than a lack of skill or motivation, accounts for the low rate of labor-market participation among migrants.

Mentorship Model

Several obstacles make it hard for migrants to participate in the Brussels job market. These barriers include an insufficient mastery of the Belgian national languages (French and Dutch), a lack of self-confidence, and an absence of support for building job skills and conducting a job search. “Navigating the job market in Brussels is very complex for newcomers. A onestop [resource] is required to break barriers and bring us closer to the Belgian job culture,” says Habibatu, a migrant from Sierra Leone.

Mentoring offers an effective way to meet that need. “We now have strong scientific evidence from numerous experiences around the world that mentoring can support positive outcomes for young people,” says Jean Rhodes, professor of psychology and research director for the Center for Evidence-Based Mentoring at the University of Massachusetts Boston.

By working with native-born mentors, young migrants in Brussels gain experience in speaking a local language, and they gain access to local professional networks. Consider Samir, a 33-year-old migrant from Togo who engaged in a mentoring relationship with Pierre, a 62-year-old Brussels resident. Both men are social workers. “Beyond being a mentor, Pierre became a reference for me,” Samir says. “His knowledge of the [career] I aspired to helped me find a job.” Fadoua, a 26-year-old accountant from Morocco, makes a similar point about her mentor, a 63-year-old Belgian named Philippe: “Linking me with Philippe, an accountant with an accomplished career, was a [great] success. I gained a new friend who helps me make better-informed decisions. Through him, I discovered another side of Belgium.”

Mentors who participate in Duo for a Job benefit from the program as well. For Christiane, a former European civil servant who mentored Sarah, a migrant from Syria, the program offers an “active aging” solution. “It was an opportunity to leverage skills developed in my professional life to help a young person grow,” Christiane explains. “It helps me stay active while contributing to social cohesion.” Laurence, who worked with a migrant from Palestine named Hala, notes that Duo for a Job increases intercultural understanding. “Weekly meetings with Hala were a real pleasure,” says Laurence, who runs a professional coaching firm. “I learned a lot about her personal story, her culture, and the expectations of her generation.”

Perhaps the most enduring benefit of Duo for a Job is that it helps form social bonds between people who would not otherwise interact with each other. That kind of impact is evident in the relationship between a Belgian native named Rose-Mary and Aissatou, a migrant from Guinea- Conakry. “Rose-Mary is like a Belgian mother for me,” says Aissatou. “She guides me in my professional and personal developments.” A mentor named Christophe offers a similar comment about Daha, a migrant from Djibouti: “I became aware of the difficulties facing young migrants. I am happy to provide Daha with [the same kinds of] referrals, tips, and advice that I gave spontaneously to my own children.”

Payment Plan

Early funding for Duo for a Job came from our (the two cofounders’) personal savings. By the summer of 2013, the organization began to run into financial trouble. “The lack of a proven track record for its program was a key hurdle to granting public subsidies to Duo for a Job,” says Grégor Chapelle, general director of Actiris, the public employment agency in Brussels. To confront this problem, we decided to use a social impact bond (SIB) mechanism. Various groups in the United States and the United Kingdom had recently started using the SIB model, but Duo for a Job was the first organization in continental Europe to adopt it.

Under this mechanism, a group of social investors led by Kois Invest—a Belgian firm that also helped to structure the SIB deal—agreed to fund a pilot version of our mentorship program. The pilot project began in early 2014 and will end in December 2016. At that point, an external entity called the Brussels Job Market Observatory will evaluate our program. Evaluators will measure the proportion of young migrants in the program who have successfully entered the job market and then benchmark that figure against the equivalent metric for a control group. The control group includes migrants with similar demographic characteristics who have not enrolled in Duo for a Job.

If the employment rate of the Duo for a Job group is at least 10 percent higher than that of the control group, the Belgian government will reimburse the social investors. Along with paying back their original investment amount, the government will pay them interest at an annualized rate that ranges from 3 percent to 7 percent (depending on the exact amount by which the Duo for a Job employment rate exceeds the control-group rate). In this scenario, the government will reap benefits both in the form of reduced public assistance costs and in the form of increased tax revenues. By design, its payout to investors will be lower than the value of those fiscal benefits.

But if the program fails to meet its target for increasing the employment rate among participants, the government owes nothing to the investors. For the government, in other words, the SIB mechanism is a win-win proposition. “The social impact bond gives Duo for a Job the opportunity to build the credentials of its program while eliminating the financial risk for the public partner,” says François de Borchgrave, managing director of Kois Invest.

Today, nearly three years after we launched our pilot, Duo for a Job stands at a crossroads. We were able to overcome our initial funding problem, but we have ambitions— ambitions related to the migrant crisis in Europe—that will test our capacity for further growth. Our plan for the next two years is to scale up our activities in Brussels and to extend our program to other cities in Belgium. During that period, we aim to provide coaching to more than 1,800 young people.

Several challenges lie ahead for our organization. First, we need to diversify and increase our funding base. Support through the SIB mechanism will end later this year, and we hope to replace it with long-term funding from both public and philanthropic sources. Second, as we move to open branches of Duo for a Job outside of Brussels, we need to develop an operations tool kit that will enable teams to run the mentorship program with limited guidance from us. And third, we need to accelerate the recruitment of native Belgian mentors who are able and willing to coach young migrant workers.

Ultimately, we hope that these mentors will become ambassadors for an open and multicultural society. In this way, Duo for a Job is working to promote values that are increasingly under threat in many Western countries.

Read more stories by Thomas Dermine, Matthieu Le Grelle & Frédéric Simonart.