Gaetan Kashala co-founded Globex Corporate, a consulting firm connecting the U.S. to Central and Western African businesses and governments, giving him a unique perspective on how collaboration between U.S.-born and foreign-born entrepreneurs can strengthen the economy. He’s also the engagement director for the Associated Industries of Massachusetts, where he works with business owners to support their contributions to the economy. Listen to learn how his father’s legacy has shaped his important work.
Transcript
Denzil Mohammed: I’m Denzil Mohammed, and this is JobMakers.
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Denzil Mohammed: Let’s face it. The world is unequal. Not everyone, everywhere is given the same chances, opportunities and avenues to fulfill their potential, to succeed. This goes for continents, countries and even within our own borders. There are often things that stand in the way for some people. For Gaetan Kashala, immigrant from the Democratic Republic of Congo, co-founder of Globex Corporate, a consulting firm connecting the U.S. to Central and Western Africa and also the engagement director for AIM, the Associated Industries of Massachusetts, he knows this all too well … both in the Congo and in the U.S. For a host of reasons, many of us are oblivious to the barriers that exist for some groups of people. Gaetan has built a career helping immigrant and other minority small business owners in the Commonwealth by giving them that opportunity for a crack at the “American Dream.” And he’s seen the results. Thriving businesses, growing families and community development. He shares their stories and his own, of a legacy built by his father in Cambridge, in this week’s JobMakers.
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Denzil Mohammed: Gaetan Kashala of the Associated Industries of Massachusetts! Welcome to JobMakers. How are you?
Gaetan Kashala: I’m doing well. How are you doing?
Denzil Mohammed: Pretty good. I’ve escaped the cold for a little bit, so I’m thankful. So, tell me a little bit about your business. It’s a very interesting business, and I know it’s one of the things that you do, but you started this with your father and you connect the U.S. to Central and Western Africa, right?
Gaetan Kashala: Yeah, absolutely. So the company is called Global Enterprise Services Corporation, and it’s a consulting firm that when we started out initially focused on government relations. We would partner with American government affairs firm and then travel to different countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, mainly Central and Western Africa in order to speak with governments, policymakers there, about us serving as their representative in the United States, whether this is before the executive branch, legislative branch, multi-laterals like the IMF, World Bank and EU. So, step one in our growth strategy was really developing deep relationships with African political leaders. And then once those relationships were in place, given that we were based out of the United States, we would reach out to members of the business community here in order to see if they were interested in exploring commercial, philanthropic opportunities that existed on the African continent. So, really symbiotic relationship, or process, in that you developed a level of trust with the governments and then leverage that to see what type of business development needs, strategic communication needs that entities in the United States, Europe and China had.
Denzil Mohammed: As a way of building up entities and initiatives in parts of Africa through partnerships in the U.S., that’s incredible. In the U.S., and you say as well in Asia and the EU. You are very familiar with Central Africa because you’re from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Tell us a little bit about what life was like, if you can recall, growing up there.
Gaetan Kashala: Sure, sure. So, I was born in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo; about 13 million – 14 million residents live there. I spent the first seven years of my life there before moving to the United States. My father was pursuing a PhD from Harvard University, so that’s what brought us there, that’s what brought us to the United States. But in terms of memories and recollections from my time there, I just remember the vibrancy and the energy of being in the capital and its situation where you would see people hustling all the time, whether that was the street vendors, there was just this entrepreneurial capacity there that in many ways was a means for folks to put food on their table and bring money and resources to their families. I don’t know how familiar you are with the socioeconomic composition of Congo or Kinshasa in general, but it’s a fairly impoverished community. I would say over 70 percent, 80 percent of the people are living below the poverty line from an international perspective, so there’s a real gap between the “haves” and the “have nots” and it was always, even as I think back on it, always really invigorating to see the vibrancy and the hustle that a lot of the people there had, because in many ways they were hustling to stay alive, to keep their family alive.
Denzil Mohammed: Your father came to do his PhD. You yourself studied at Tufts. One of the things the American public really doesn’t know is that the smartest immigrant group is actually African immigrants to the U.S. They have the highest educational attainment as a group. Much of your work now is focused on this idea of engagement, connection, economic prosperity, equity and you’re the engagement director at AIM, the Associated Industries of Massachusetts. I find it interesting that they say in their mission, “We further assert that such economic opportunity must reflect the principles of diversity, equity and inclusion. Everyone must have a voice on the economic future of Massachusetts.” What does that mean?
Gaetan Kashala: I’m really glad you asked that question. So, I currently serve as a co-chair on AIM’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Staff Council. AIM had recognized that it wanted its membership to reflect the diversity that exists in Massachusetts, and they wanted to serve as a convener of discussions between the business community as well as historically marginalized population. Ultimately what we’re looking to do from a DEI perspective is just to really make sure that our membership looks like what we see out in Massachusetts, and then we’re playing a role to support that effort, whether that’s through DEI training programs that we offer to members, whether that’s through highlighting the accomplishments of Black, brown, women-led businesses. We understand that this is a continual learning process and we want to be that convener of productive conversations.
Denzil Mohammed: Tell me a little bit about some of the immigrant-owned businesses that you’ve interacted with; there’s the Southeast-Asian Business Coalition and various other associations like that. Do they stand out at all to you … you talked about the hustle in Kinshasa. Do you see that sometimes in some of these business owners?
Gaetan Kashala: Yeah, absolutely. And it’s really amazing because whether it’s the groups that I’ve interacted with, or I currently live in Dorchester right now in the Savin Hills area, and see business, whether it’s Vietnamese businesses, Haitian businesses … I’ve heard of countless situations where one person comes to the United States, immigrates here, starts up a business, begins sending money back home in order to bring more family members here, the family members come here and then they come in and work for the business, support the business and, importantly, add tremendous value to the communities in which they’ve immigrated to. These are not, and not to overly generalize, but in my experience, these are not people that are here looking for handouts. They are came here with a belief in the American dream, a belief in the American meritocratic society, which is also something I should have brought up earlier relative to Congo because in many ways you have your “haves” and you have your “haves nots,” right? Sometimes the “haves” is that you are a “have” because of where you were born, or what tribe you are in, and if that tribe is empowered then you’re getting jobs. So a lot of the motivation for coming to the United States, it’ll be a lot of the attraction, is just that belief that in America, you can accomplish anything. You put some hard work into it, but there’s opportunity here and that I see on a daily basis, every time I walk to get my coffee, my Vietnamese coffee … it’s really uplifting to see.
Denzil Mohammed: That’s incredible, and you know, Americans don’t realize how much of the world is like what you just talked about, separated by class and tribe and lineage and their last names, the color of their skin, where these are real barriers that have been around for generations and generations. And I like that you’ve met these business owners, you’ve talked to them over the years, you’ve pushed for economic equity in Dorchester in your previous roles going down at the community level and talking and meeting these people, seeing the shared diversity that we have in Massachusetts, for instance. It’s not a situation where there’s one big dominant immigrant group. It’s been evenly split. Haitians, Brazilians, Chinese, Indians … how have you seen immigrant entrepreneurship impact the Massachusetts economy and some of the local economies that you’ve been involved with?
Gaetan Kashala: Yeah, I’ve seen it in a number of ways…
Denzil Mohammed: … you mentioned that you live in Savin Hill and I think of Fields Corner
Gaetan Kashala: … yeah, absolutely! You think of Fields Corner, Upham’s Corner. So when I worked at Dorchester Bay Economic Development Corporation, I was responsible for building up the economic mobility program, and an interesting thing about Dorchester Bay is it’s a CFI, a Certified Financial Institution, so they essentially had a bank, a mission-driven bank, that was focusing on lending money and disenfranchised communities. So we would get funds from either the Small Business Administration or the Treasury department, and our charge was to provide capital to those that historically had a difficult time accessing those traditional sources of capital. We supported a whole number of entrepreneurs, many of them were immigrants, so I had the opportunity to meet with these folks, hear about what businesses they wanted to put in place and then work with them, whether it’s through providing technical assistance, how to put together business plan, marketing plan, website … these are the type of basic financial statements that you’re gonna meet. It was in that experience that I had that firsthand look into the immigrant entrepreneur story. I recall working with a lady from Kenya, I believe, she had come here from Kenya, had been working in the health care space for a while, started off as a CNA and then went into administration. She was director of a nursing home and decided that, given her experience, which led her to really see the need for health care staffing, she wanted to start a home health care staffing operation. It was working with her hand-in-hand, wrote her business plan, put together the website, and, now in the process of trying to solicit some funding that she’ll need to be able to really kick off her operation. And importantly, especially in nursing home care, the vast majority of the caregivers are immigrants. And, for the story I was talking about specifically, that represents about 90 to 95 percent of their workforce.
Denzil Mohammed: That’s incredible … 90 to 95 percent. I mean, we’ve seen it, we’ve seen who are the ones taking care of the sick, the elderly generally, but even through this pandemic. It’s your Jamaican nurse, or your Filipino nurse. They’re a huge part of our health care system and many other industries. I want to push back on two things briefly. One is, people are going to listen to this podcast, you talk about it was basically a bank that was giving out money to these disenfranchised communities, and they’re gonna call that a handout. Was that a handout?
Gaetan Kashala: No, no, absolutely not. Because for one plain definitional reason, the funds would be transferred in the form of a loan, but very low interest loan relative to what you would see out there in the normal market. So there is nothing being “handed out” at least through our loan process. Another thing I would just have folks be mindful of … some of the challenges, and I would say a lot of these structural challenges, that exist that prevented a lot of these groups from being able to access capital. So I wouldn’t call this a “handout” in any way that you would say, “Okay, my parent paying for my college education” was a handout. This is really about providing opportunity. In my job, my work there was all built around how do you position folks to be able to achieve economic mobility, and our thesis was that you focus on providing them with human capital, who are the individuals that they’re around that they can leverage and network to be able to advance, the social capital, what’s the infrastructure and institutions that are around there, whether it’s from a school perspective, different trainings and things like that. And then finally, it’s the financial capital. Money obviously is the oxygen that allows us to do a lot of different things. We/I kind of look at it from that framework where in order to position folks for economic mobility, you gotta focus on that human, social and financial capital, find ways to introduce that expand that to different businesses, individuals and what have you.
Denzil Mohammed: So you are saying that there are systemic barriers in the U.S., even here where we think that there’s just this level playing field. Another thing I want to challenge you on is in terms of your business, your consulting business. The model is about connection. It’s about bridging the divides between continents and countries, but we’re in an era, I would say, where people want to “close in.” They want to close the borders, they want to look inward. It’s about America first. How have you seen this notion of bridges and connections with all these different parts of the world in the U.S.? Has that been a good thing in your estimate?
Gaetan Kashala: So in one way, I understand what you are saying, but I think we have to be careful about the connection we make between the political rhetoric that we hear and see, and what’s going on business-to-business, business-wise. Take, for example, like climate change. You heard a lot of talk about the Glasgow conference, but then there’s, “Oh, these governments aren’t making commitments, the politicians aren’t making realistic commitments.” But then if you look at the business-to-business level, you see that there’s tremendous work being done. Fundamentally, if you’re able to demonstrate value to someone, whether that’s an individual or an organization, you’re able to provide them with something that they need, that they cannot get elsewhere, or can’t get elsewhere at a price that makes sense. I think that’s ultimately what this is all about, right? It’s about you’re seeing the demand, that’s out there, you’re seeing there’s a need out there, whether that’s for a construction worker, whether that’s for coffee and you’re filling that need. So, if you’re looking at things from an immigrant entrepreneur perspective, it’s just about really going out there, hustling, trying to identify those opportunities and be able to effectively articulate, communicate what value you bring relative to the other options that are on the table or in the market.
Denzil Mohammed: I love the way you talk about markets, the economy, business-to-business and how business moves these policy changes even, you know? And for the betterment of all of us, for the betterment of the population. I want to bring it back to you and your family, and you move here when you were really young, but you do remember the impoverished parts of Kinshasa. You do remember what it was like. How do you feel about the U.S. as your adopted home?
Gaetan Kashala: I really feel grateful to be here, especially knowing what the situation exists in Congo from a poverty perspective, from an infrastructure perspective, whether you’re talking bridges, clean water, electricity. I think coming to the US, it was almost like a clean slate, or a canvas that you can draw your story on. And it was a cleaner canvas than probably existed in Congo, so there’s a lot more opportunity, a lot of different things that, that could be drawn on that canvas. And that’s really something that should be appreciated.
Denzil Mohammed: And I think that you drawing something that’s really exceptional, something that capitalizes on the diversity that we all experience. And I’m glad that your father made that move. Thank you very much for you and your family being here and for advancing the things that you’re advancing through your work, through your business, through AIM. Gaetan Kashala, thank you so much for joining us on JobMakers. It’s a real pleasure talking to you.
Gaetan Kashala: Yeah, likewise! Thank you very much for having me.
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Denzil Mohammed: JobMakers is a weekly podcast about immigrant entrepreneurship and contribution produced by Pioneer Institute, a think tank in Boston, and The Immigrant Learning Center in Malden, Massachusetts, a not-for-profit that gives immigrants a voice.
Got comments, questions or know someone we should talk to? Email denzil [at] jobmakerspodcast.org. Thank you for joining us for another inspiring conversation. I’m Denzil Mohammed. See you next Thursday at noon for another JobMakers.
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