Meet the Enterprises in the NESsT - IKEA Social Entrepreneurship Latin America Accelerator Advancing Diversity & Equity Efforts
Key Takeaways:
85 million people in Latin America live with a disability, yet only 10-20% participate in the workforce.
Four social enterprises in the NESsT - IKEA Social Entrepreneurship Latin America Accelerator are building inclusive workplaces across Latin America.
Across the globe, people with disabilities are employed at a substantially lower rate than their peers despite having the capacity and desire to work. This is not only a violation of people's human rights that keeps the disability community unemployed, dependent and excluded, it also prevents employers from building diverse teams which are known to perform significantly better than non- diverse ones.
Four social enterprises in the NESsT-IKEA Social Entrepreneurship Latin America Accelerator are building inclusive workplaces across Latin America, a region where only 10-20% of people with disabilities participate in the workforce.
What is disability inclusion?
Disability inclusion is possible in a workplace that values the strengths of every individual. It offers employees equal opportunities to create, learn, and to be compensated for their evolving expertise. True equity and inclusion is a culture that celebrates neurodivergence and that encourages designing with disability in mind.
Why build inclusive workplaces?
In Latin America, 85 million people live with some form of disability, whether invisible or visible, temporary or permanent, hereditary or created by their environment. People with disabilities have been historically excluded and intentionally othered around the world. This is felt in areas like health, education, and economic opportunity where services are not designed to accommodate the full spectrum of differences in the population. The result: 80% of youth with disabilities drop out of school and 80 - 90% of working-age people with disabilities remain unemployed.
The NESsT - IKEA Social Entrepreneurship Latin America Accelerator selected four social enterprises that are improving disability inclusion solutions across the region.
These social enterprises connect employers who are on the search for rising talent with professionals with disabilities. Beyond supporting the recruiting process, these enterprises create awareness about the biases present in recruiting strategies and how to design more accessible workplaces.
The four social enterprises you will read about here are part of the 15 social enterprises receiving tailor-made support from the NESsT and IKEA networks so that the businesses can scale. The accelerator is focused on unlocking the next level of creativity and implementation when it comes to the areas of product development, logistics and operations, marketing & communications, business development and marketplace access, and last but not least, employment inclusion for all who need it most.
Empanacombi
Empanacombi produces high-quality empanadas, baked, and frozen food products sold throughout Peru. Founded in 2012, the social enterprise helps individuals with disabilities build careers. It trains and employs people with mixed abilities in baking and catering, helping them to achieve financial independence and become more visible members of the Peruvian society.
To better accommodate the needs of each employee, Empanacombi built an inclusive kitchen with assistive technology. The enterprise also teaches employees sign language to ensure clear communication with staff members who are hard of hearing, which increases work efficiency. Empanacombi co-founder Cynthia Rodriguez emphasized that they are committed to “leaving no one behind.”
Incluyeme
Based in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Incluyeme is a social enterprise that connects people with disabilities to job openings at corporations dedicated to building inclusive and equitable workplaces. Since launching, Incluyeme has placed 2,000 people with disabilities into employment across Latin America, and has more than 200,000 users registered on its platform.
Through training sessions, Incluyeme helps companies overcome hiring biases and realize the value of labor diversity. According to founder Gabriel Marcolongo, companies learn to “find talent among 100% of the population of working age rather than only from 88% of the labor force who live without disabilities.
Lazarillo
Lazarillo is an accessible, multifunctional application designed for people with visual disabilities. The application offers way-finding services that allow visually-impaired users to navigate urban spaces independently and provides a platform for users to seek employment, make online purchases, and exchange information with others. The application has helped more than 185,000 users across 45 countries.
During the pandemic, Lazarillo helped its users connect with the world, providing individuals with disabilities up-to-date information about vaccinations, healthcare, subsidies, and changing lockdown regulations.
PIXED
PIXED is a social enterprise that specializes in the development of low-cost, high-quality medical technologies for children and adults with physical disabilities, such as 3D-printed prosthetics. The social enterprise offers psychological and technical accompaniment to ensure that users successfully adopt the product in their daily lives. In doing so, the enterprise can adjust the hardware as each person’s body evolves as a result of increased mobility.
Through its products, PIXED is expanding employment opportunities for people with physical disabilities as well as parents of children with disabilities.
Workplaces and systems that can be accessed by all people regardless of their disability remove rigid barriers to employment, providing millions of capable, working-age individuals an opportunity to strive for their full potential.
In turn, by allowing more voices to be heard, companies that adopt an inclusive work culture benefit from higher employee engagement and improved innovation.
About NESsT
NESsT invests in social enterprises that create quality jobs for underserved communities while sustaining the planet. NESsT raises philanthropic and impact investing capital to support the poorest communities facing isolation, discrimination, and lack of jobs skills or education. Since its launch, the organization has trained over 21,000 entrepreneurs, supported over 1200 social enterprises and invested in close to 200 that have created over 70,000 quality jobs benefitting 700,000 underserved individuals in emerging market countries.
About IKEA Social Entrepreneurship
IKEA’s vision is to create a better everyday life for as many people as possible. IKEA Social Entrepreneurship began in 2012 to look at how the IKEA brand could include products and services from social entrepreneurs in our offer. More recently IKEA expanded its support to include programmes that accelerate the movement of social entrepreneurship in general. Supporting social enterprises with a vision to create a more inclusive and equal society, our ambition is to have a positive impact on people’s livelihoods. Today, we back and boost social entrepreneurs all over the world, as well as expand the business we do together. That way, we get to be a part of creating new opportunities for vulnerable people and communities – while fighting the root causes of poverty and inequality.