Strategic Partnership · Refugee Entrepreneurship · Fragile States
How SPARK uses Gohorto to turn refugee entrepreneurs into funded, growing businesses — at scale, across 15+ fragile states
In fragile states and conflict-affected regions, building a startup ecosystem from scratch is one of the hardest things an organization can do. SPARK does it every day. Gohorto is how they do it at scale.
SPARK: creating better jobs for young people in the world’s toughest places
SPARK is an Amsterdam-based international NGO with a clear mission: create better jobs for young people in fragile states. The organization was built to operate in exactly the environments most development organizations find too hard—post-conflict zones, fragile states, refugee-hosting communities, and economies rebuilding from scratch.
From Syria to South Sudan, from Libya to Kosovo, from Palestine to Ukraine, SPARK’s mission is the same everywhere: create real, sustainable economic opportunities for young people who have run out of them. Entrepreneurship sits at the heart of how SPARK does that—not as a buzzword, but as a structured, methodical process: finding people with ideas, training them to build businesses, connecting them with mentors and coaches, and putting real seed money in the hands of those with the most potential to grow.
Running that process well, across multiple countries, multiple cohorts, and multiple partner organizations simultaneously, requires infrastructure that most NGOs don’t have. SPARK built theirs on Gohorto.
- Amsterdam-based international NGO
- 15+ countries of operation across fragile states
- Co-founder of BINA Program (with IsDB and SESRIC)
- Funded by Qatar Fund for Development, the EU, and others
- Refugee and displaced-youth entrepreneurship
- Higher education and scholarships in fragile states
- SME coaching, business support centers, and seed funding
- Decent work and economic resilience (UN SDG 8)
- NAMA Startup Competition series (with BINA, in Türkiye)
- Skills Training Education Programme (STEP)
- Tech for Inclusivity (UPTIME)
- Palestine Launchpad with Google
- Economic Resilience through COVID-19
- Green Forward — green & circular economy
- Türkiye, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, Iraq, Syria
- Libya, Tunisia, Egypt
- Somalia, South Sudan, Burundi
- Kosovo, Ukraine, and beyond
- 84,240+ trained in business skills
- 14,534+ businesses created & grown
- 33,965+ jobs created
- 14,523+ scholarships awarded
A strategic partnership built for the world’s toughest places
SPARK doesn’t work in easy places. The organization was built to operate where most development organizations find it too hard—post-conflict zones, fragile states, refugee-hosting communities, and economies that are rebuilding from scratch. From Syria to South Sudan, from Libya to Kosovo, the mission is the same everywhere: create real, sustainable economic opportunities for young people who have run out of them.
Entrepreneurship is at the heart of how SPARK does that—not entrepreneurship as a buzzword, but as a structured, methodical process. Running it well across multiple countries, multiple cohorts, and multiple partner organizations simultaneously requires infrastructure that most NGOs don’t have. SPARK built theirs on Gohorto.
The NAMA program: what refugee entrepreneurship looks like in practice
Seven stages, hundreds of participants, one coherent system
26 consultants recruited, assessed, and enrolled in 60 hours of training across marketing, HR, finance, product design, and pitching. Each earns an ILM-certified qualification. All of it tracked and documented in Gohorto.
80 startup-phase entrepreneurs apply and enroll in foundational training: business plans, pitching skills, team leadership, HR, and idea development—with ILM certification upon completion.
A jury committee evaluates all 80 applicants and selects 60 to advance to the bootcamp phase. Scores, criteria, and decisions are documented for donor accountability.
60 businesses go through 120 hours of entrepreneurship training based on BINA’s curriculum. The 26 certified consultants guide each team through their journey.
25 startups are selected and awarded seed funding. Winners span food, technology, education, and services—all Syrian refugee-led businesses building sustainable enterprises in Türkiye.
The 25 funded startups enter a 4-month incubation with BINA Business Incubator, with the top 30 receiving over 200 hours of tailored mentorship and coaching ahead of the final pitch.
Three finalists are awarded cash prizes ($2,000 / $1,500 / $1,000). All graduates are tracked in the aftercare phase. Outcomes are reported to the Qatar Fund for Development and mapped to UN SDG 8 targets.
Beyond Türkiye, SPARK operates across 15+ countries—with programs running in Libya, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, Iraq, Somalia, South Sudan, Kosovo, Ukraine, and beyond. Each context is different. Each program has different partners, different donors, different participant profiles. But the need for a professional incubation operating system is the same everywhere—and that is what Gohorto provides across every geography SPARK works in.
Consistency that compounds across editions
One of the most underappreciated outcomes of using Gohorto is the ability to run the same program better, every time. Each NAMA edition inherits the process design, evaluation criteria, coach templates, and reporting structure of the one before it. The learning compounds. By NAMA IV, the program runs with the precision of an institution that has been doing this for decades—because the platform carries the institutional memory.
When one of SPARK’s 26 certified consultants sits down with a startup for their first coaching session, they already know the startup’s application, jury scores, bootcamp progress, and training completion. That context—which used to require a manual briefing pack—is just there, inside Gohorto. The result is better coaching, faster. Founders feel it immediately.
And the Qatar Fund for Development funds NAMA because it produces outcomes, and because those outcomes are verifiable. Gohorto is a significant part of why they’re verifiable: every funding decision, every training hour, every job-creation target is tracked in a system that produces clean, credible data—the kind that makes a donor want to fund the next edition before the current one is finished.
What this partnership means for the development sector
For decades, NGOs working in fragile and conflict-affected contexts have run their programs on a mix of spreadsheets, custom-built tools, and consultant-managed processes. The idea that a purpose-built SaaS platform could handle the realities of these environments—diverse cohorts, refugee populations, multiple funders, complex donor reporting, and constrained connectivity—was a serious operational question.
The SPARK–Gohorto partnership answers it. Programs that used to be assembled cycle by cycle now run as repeatable, configurable, donor-ready operations. Teams on the ground spend less time on coordination and more time on impact. And every successful program becomes a launchpad for the next—across countries, sectors, and partner configurations.
For SPARK and Gohorto, that is what scaling impact in fragile states actually looks like.
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