An Immigrant Entrepreneurs’ Perspective on Building Diverse & Inclusive Communities in Atlantic Canada

by | Oct 29, 2020 | Blog, News

On October 29th, Venn Innovation hosted “Venn Innovation Collision Day: Building Connected, Diverse, and Inclusive Communities in Atlantic Canada”. They were joined by Startup Zone’s very own Jonah Chininga, Founder of MICC Financial.

“This Collision Day (was) designed to connect tech companies with municipalities, local governments, Indigenous communities and newcomers across Atlantic Canada to explore how they can harness the power of technology to build connected, diverse and inclusive communities.”

Startup Zone’s Jonah Chininga (shown here on the right) was a guest speaker at the event.

Jonah talked about unlocking and empowering the social potential in Atlantic Canada, which he certainly does as the founder of a socially-conscious fin-tech company. He says that in order to do this, we have to understand the real problems. As an immigrant from Zimbabwe, he talked about the gaps between initiatives and policies, and that work needs to be done here to integrate immigrants into their communities much faster and more efficiently.

As it stands right now, immigrants hoping to bring innovative solutions to Canada as an entrepreneur must first show a lot of resilience and overcome many more hurdles than a Canadian citizen would. The biggest problem he and other immigrants noticer is the difficulty of often having to establish yourself in Canada and obtain a Permanent Residence before you can be given the same respect and opportunities as those around you. Immigrants run into a variety of other barriers on top of this, one of which Jonah brought up being the Canadian credit score model, and how we need to find different ways of looking at immigrants’ cash flow.

When it comes to improving economic development, Jonah emphasized the importance of viewing equity, diversity, and inclusion as an opportunity rather than a problem. Each coming from their own unique backgrounds, immigrants provide an opportunity to see unique solutions that can help Canada move and develop faster.

Jonah’s company “MICC Financial” provides an alternative to traditional savings programs by implementing a rotational model. This model is new in Canada, yet common in other places of the world. By empowering immigrants like Jonah, we can bring a variety of solutions to a variety of locations across the world!

To follow along with Jonah, check out MICC Financial today!