Sustainable Corporate Expatriation

Marina Malmberg is Founder/CEO of Sustainable Expatriation and has worked with expatriate populations since 2012.  An expatriate in three countries herself, she has successfully raised funds and developed international NGO and MNE partnerships to create sustainable expatriation practices and address corporate social responsibility.

Navine Eldesouki is the Founder of ‘Coffee with an Expat’ and the global Facebook community “Coffee with Expat Women”. A global nomad for two decades raising four children across 5 continents, 7 countries and 14 houses, Navine’s journey working within four different industries navigating the intricacies of expat life has culminated in her role as Co-Director of Sustainable Expatriation.

Megan Penhoet is a global social entrepreneur, Founder/Director of Nordic Scholars Leadership Institute and Co-Director of Sustainable Expatriation. A graduate of Stanford University where she also served as Assistant Director of Travel Study Programs, she has worked in over 15 countries.

In 2020, 25 years after the adoption of the Beijing Platform for Action, serial corporate expatriate spouses face vast inequalities through work permit denial in the countries to which they are posted. This leads to career loss and often a lifetime of lost independence through expatriation for mothers of children under 18. When repatriating, the MNE’s responsibility ends despite the Human Rights Due Diligence recommendation to identify, mitigate and remediate affected stakeholders. In Sweden a master’s level educated woman may struggle for 14 years to find permanent employment. This stands in stark contrast to Sweden’s No.1 EU status in diversity EIGE. Our solution of partnerships for SDGs creates multi-dimensional shared value (CSV) through extinguishing inequalities facing affected women, while simultaneously helping corporations engage in sustainable expatriation. Moreover, our solution drives improved sustainability compliance and creates tax payers for societies all while addressing human rights and serious unemployment challenges.

Highly qualified female expatriate spouses deprived of work permits through expatriate assignments as the accompanying spouse/life partner face lifelong or protracted unemployment. Each MNE, international NGO or organization with globally rotated employees faces these challenges without effective solutions. It is notable that MNEs end all responsibility for repatriates, contradicting corporate ethics and Human Rignts Due Diligence (HRDD).

Many expatriate spouses face career loss. Those expatriates and repatriates who are denied work permits while accompanying a partner experience a denial of their human right to employment. They can face a lifelong challenge of career struggle leading to total financial dependence and even poverty. Cut off pension plans, personal economic distress and sometimes the inability to sustain their children in case of divorces due to unfamiliar legal environments can leave a woman with nothing. Loss of parental rights and serious mental and physical challenges can follow. Divorce rates among expatriates are up to 80% in some Nordic countries, where female foreign academics with Master degrees generally look for employment for as many as 14 years. Now with the COVID pandemic causing massive global unemployment, an already serious set of problems with multiple barriers to employment has reached a new level of urgency.

We have developed a complex solution with Blue Ocean innovation. Our MVP is a tech-based online hub for expatriate spouses providing the missing tangible support they sorely lack. Our global online hub enables expatriate spouses regardless of location to work remotely, to regain lost self-esteem, to gain job skills and to restart their careers. Our MVP focuses on female corporate expatriate spouses and repatriates who are mothers with children under 18 with a minimum of three expat assignments. This population is scattered around the globe and have advanced intercultural experiences yet longtime unemployment records. The hub is managed in Sweden and Denmark as a cross-border innovation. Our global expatriate online community is managed from Dubai. Our networks for expansion include Dubai, the U.S., and the UK where our global team members are based.

Our solution provides easy accessible and tangible remediation according to Human Rights Due Diligence (HRDD) for MNEs. Our initiative drives and supports the new standards, certification and the audits for Sustainable Expatriation that will be enforced by forthcoming mandatory HRDD rules. We are in a dialogue with a leading global law firm interested in developing and scaling our solution.

Our solution is to work both with primarily female expat spouses/life partners themselves and to broker corporate partnerships incorporating the UN SDGs. We create shared value (CSV) for both the host MNE and expat partner by addressing the inherent inequalities in the current system. Many expat spouses have substantial academic backgrounds (45% hold MA or PhDs) yet they are often marginalized; failing to secure the employment necessary to develop their careers and to support their families. 34% of expat spouses are women with children under the age of 18 whose careers are derailed or stopped due to relocation. 62% of expat spouses report difficulty at losing their professional and personal support networks. Families in these circumstances frequently suffer from emotional and mental strain and the expatriate divorce rate is 80% in Sweden. Expatriate spouses have few resources to become a sole wage earner, seek emotional support or professional career counseling. In countries like Sweden, professional career counseling is limited to B2B services for MNEs who offer it to their redundant staff, however, never to their expatriate spouses. The challenge remains global in 2020 and is amplified by the global COVID unemployment challenge.

BGRS Global Mobility Trends Survey 2016

We solve the 3D problem of the global and traditionally left behind group of expatriate spouses who lack access to their basic human right to work resulting in lifelong unemployment challenges after expatriate assignments without work permits. We raise global awareness about the challenge mothers with children under 18 face having sacrificed careers to corporations and who are then disqualified from recruitment processes due to unavoidable employment gaps on their CVs. Marginalization leads to failed expatriate contracts - costing MNEs up to $250,000 per employee. We address the general lack of MNE understanding of these issues and provide collaborative solutions.

After six challenging years without expatriate support through corporate expatriate assignments in Italy and Pakistan, Marina repatriated to Sweden - her husband's home country. Here, Marina spent 14 years searching unsuccessfully for work despite holding an MBA, having significant work experience in Swedish corporations and a strong leadership track record in social impact projects managing a Swedish foundation in Russia. While raising her daughter, Marina landed only three job interviews, secured only a temporary job at IKEA and one consultancy assignment. Since 2016 she has focused on expatriate support and intercultural stress management. She has a successful track record and has changed the lives of all expatriates with whom she has worked. Expanding her global team in 2020, Marina accelerated her influential work backed up by relevant coursework at Copenhagen Business School in Business Responsibilities for Human Rights, CSR/DEI, Managing People in MNEs and Go to Market Strategies for Innovative Startups, Products and Services. Through expanding her network and education, Marina developed her business plan and initiated cross-border Swedish-Danish collaboration. Securing global partners and developing a relevant tech platform, she is poised to rapidly scale the program, providing the missing services for expatriates and MNEs with 7D Shared Value Creation.

Our team has first hand experience of the entire cycle of corporate expatriation with the perspective of 14 years of repatriation career challenges. As a Founder/CEO, Marina's life goal has been to hold MNEs accountable to their responsibility to provide remediation to each corporate expatriate spouse, former and present, who lacked a work permit through expatriation therein becoming unemployable. We will seek support from the UN/OECD/ILO to recognize expatriate spouses as a vulnerable global group through giving it a special status qualifying for work permits worldwide. We have specific recommendations for the MNEs and societies to end the all too common expatriate professional and social marginalization and the resulting 'corporate slavery', and in particular to protect the future employability of mothers with children under 18.

Marina lived in Italy and Pakistan for 6 years without a work permit. She experienced depression as a result of the exhausting 3-year Italian visa/migration processes. Having been denied an Italian entry visa, Sweden stepped in to provide a Swedish visa while Marina was a citizen of Russia. Throughout Marina's expatriate life and repatriation, she saw no expatriate spousal support and vowed to address this global problem.

Our team competences and life experiences complement one another. Together we have solid expertise in real-time expatriation experiences through Navine’s 20 year-long ongoing expat journey, in which she constantly recreates herself professionally with each relocation and through the 1.7K expat women forum she manages. Marina brings her own striking 14 year-long expat job search experience, her corporate background and international NGO leadership experience in Russia and Pakistan, and her tested solution to the root cause of intercultural expat stress. She’s spent 20 years informally assisting expats and has worked full time as an expat support provider since 2016. Megan brings expertise in innovation, international program education development, and skill training along with her experience as an NGO founder and director. Together we have built a solid professional global network and found meaningful, well-positioned supporters in Sweden, Denmark, the US, Dubai, India, the Netherlands, the UK, Spain, and Russia.

Since 2011 Marina has worked on the development of expatriate solutions,  self-financing Sustainable Expatriation and reinvesting her income in additional education. She also registered as a  provider at SIRVA relocation, assisted expatriate spouses from Apple, IKEA, ESS Lund, Max IV, Region Skane and documented expatriate stress and frustration related to expatriate spouse career loss. This inspired Marina to develop effective solutions. Simultaneously, she built relationships with MNEs, raised funds for a local free program for marginalized academics in Sweden and received MNE encouragement to continue developing her solution to scale up globally through her identified tech platforms.

All three of our managing team have been solo entrepreneurs around the world. All have raised children while pursuing entrepreneurial careers, learning the nuances of niche sectors and code-switching to gain traction in their endeavors. Founder Marina overcame hiring bias by starting her own expatriate one-on-one and group support programs while pursuing further education in business responsibilities for human rights, CSR, diversity, equality, international HRM, entrepreneurship and innovation at Copenhagen Business School to grow her business with social impact. Marina developed relationships with and gained interest from strategic investors in Sweden, Denmark and the U.S. Co-director Navine launched an online expatriate facebook group that became a full-time support network for over 1,700 expatriates while raising her children and moving to multiple countries as an expatriate herself. Co-director Megan learned Swedish to achieve stronger impact with her partners and collaborators as she launched her own Nordic-facing NGO. We are a team of women who persevere in the face of challenge, who reach out globally to build social capital and grow networks of support and who research and acquire the necessary skills ourselves to succeed at changing the lives of disenfranchised women around the world.

Founder/CEO Marina managed Susanne Westerberg's "Minnesfonden", a Swedish philanthropic foundation and all its project management in Russia 1998-2000. This included all practical preparations for Swedish Queen Sylvia's first welfare visit to St.Petersburg, Russia. She also managed teams for Tetra Pak, and NGO teams in Russia and at SOS Children’s Villages National Office in Lahore, Pakistan in 2004. Here, Marina was assigned a change management role and traveled alone to Northern Pakistan to persuade the former general of the Pakistani Army to change his way of working. No one had succeeded in this before. Marina overcame the barriers of systematic structural discrimination in Swedish recruitment and sought out the education necessary to advance her NGO traveling daily to Denmark for business school. In 2017 Marina helped a Swedish NGO to raise funds for a free program in business startups for foreign academics as funds were denied for expatriate spouses who dominated the program.

Navine built and manages her popular and admirable 1,7K Facebook "Coffee with Expat Women" community and Megan founded and runs her own international NGO, Nordic Scholars Leadership Institute that gained immediate transatlantic popularity across the Nordic countries.

Corporate governance, sustainability reporting and OECD guidelines have no focus on expatriate spouse difficulties. This primarily female population experiences strong negative impacts of spousal dependency and the inability, despite skills and education, to secure employment.

We address the absence of an ISO standard for sustainable expatriation and develop important protections for this population in partnership with the OECD, ILO and ISO. These same challenges face all international institutions with expatriates, not just businesses. There is currently no global solution focused on solving these issues. We provide tangible and measurable outcomes, rather than 'expat window dressing'. We disrupt unsustainable corporate mobility and global relocation. We challenge corporate governance to be responsible, and support sustainability reporting and Agenda 2030. No organization can currently claim they solve the G5 until the human rights infractions of expatriate spouses through the process of expatriation are remediated. We have unlimited potential for scale in global geography, gender inclusivity, and in addressing globalization needs and the entire scope of immigration. Our solution can help all classifications of immigrants, including refugees in the long run. We will create new ventures with sustainable social impact to improve the lives of people worldwide. Serial expatriate spouses hold untapped talent and outstanding intercultural competence. Our program concepts are recognized as innovative by Trade & Industry Office Malmo City, SwedenVATI of Sweden, Ideon Innovation, Sweden, Lowenstein Sandler, Trevor Blake, Nordic Scholars Leadership Institute.

Sustainable Expatriation seizes the moment of opportunity we see before us. We support the human rights of all women capitalizing on the heightened global interest in advocacy for marginalized populations such as expatriate spouses. Our mobile platform, skills training program and support network provide our target audience of expatriate women who want to remain active members of civil society, with the tools they need to succeed. We advocate for their human rights at the global level by working with international agencies like the OECD, UN and EC collaborating to improve the lives of expatriate spouses whose human rights have heretofore been overlooked. By working directly with MNE’s, together we become part of the solution to the problems they have overlooked for too long.

We build a world where regardless of a woman’s location, at any working age, she has access to financial independence, fair legal representation and the social capital required to succeed in life. By addressing root causes and working with international organizations to create mandates and laws to protect this population, and through technology and programs, we provide global support networks and skills training to our target audience. Simultaneously we help MNEs with tangible mitigation and remediation. Moreover, we can do so rapidly and scale quickly for an exponentially greater impact on our stakeholder population. We are uniquely positioned to work with global organizations capable of mobilizing for women’s equality. Our global online hub provides solutions that work for women and families with easy global access. Our impact will be swift, deep, measurable and long lasting.

According to  Sources Expat Communication- HSBC- Bersin by Deloitte, 5 million women followed their partners in expatriation worldwide in 2019. As our program is an online global hub, we hope to eventually reach as many of this 5M population as possible through our technology. Our MVP focuses on women with children under 18 and we have a community of 1.7K currently in our database to whom we can offer our program immediately. Working with a technology partner we aim to reach this population with our beta product within six months and grow the program and product exponentially. In one year we envision offering a full suite of offerings to a growing target audience. In five years we envision reaching as many of the 5M women we know are living globally without the tools they require to succeed.

As Steve Jobs said, "The People who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do". We are confident that together, growing our global team, we will be able to SOLVE the challenges expatriate spouses face and scale it up in five years to other strategic expatriate locations.

Our first-year plan is to fund our work and find capital for our tech platform and solutions allowing us to grow exponentially and globally in different languages. We will create online employment and workplaces for expat spouses. We also plan to extend our support and become an all gender inclusive solution once we have addressed the urgent needs of economically dependent mothers with children under 18.

We also see our platform potentially suitable for caregivers and generational inclusion of well-educated stay-at-home mothers who lost their employability. We can support their talents and passion for helping people assisting their international social businesses for the people and planet.

Before scaling, we will measure impact and analyze results. Working with MNEs through our platform will allow MNEs to make sure their corporate mobility is aligned with HRDD, Agenda 2030. Doing so extinguishes silo'd and biased approaches common to monocultures. 

We also hope for dialogue with and support from governments, currently prohibiting expatriate spouses from working. We aim to involve each government to support expatriate spouses globally leading to improved globalization. 

Our challenges:

• Risk of lifelong unemployability that often leads to divorce and the ensuing risk of losing access to all support, sometimes even parental rights due to absence of their own income.
• Expat spouses seldom find the understanding, empathy and employment needed due to the myth and biases surrounding them notably that they are "luxury" problems.
• Nobody supports repatriates or includes them in the HRDD process despite the majority of expat spouses surrendering their careers, professional growth, and independence to MNEs who end all support after expatriation despite OECD recommendations to remediate caused harm.

Article Is divorce more common among expat couples?

The plight of the expat/trailing spouse was recognized since 1981 from publications in the WSJ. Despite this fact, there are still no constructive measures or support available to address the entire scope of expatriation and repatriattion. Article Trailing Spouse Syndrome

We are a team of women who persevere in the face of challenge, who reach
out globally to build social capital and grow networks of support and
who research and acquire the necessary skills ourselves to succeed at
changing the lives of disenfranchised women around the world. We need
funding for a global change. Many countries finance only local
projects that result in little meaningful expatriate support. We look for funding and investors who focus on global impact and who can see the value in disrupting corporate governance for good. We believe in collaborating with and educating potential partners and investors to achieve the positive and inclusive benefits pursuing Sustainable Corporate Expatriation will drive.

#UN75 - helping the UN75 to engage expat women in human rights conversation, Coffee with Expat Women - Dubai based 1,7K+ Facebook community managed by Navine Eldesoiki who volunteers for Sustainable Expatriation, NSLI - Megan Penhoet - our Co-Director and strategic partner in the US, Trevor Blake - Marina's mentor who considers Marina’s innovation "a Noble cause" and supports Marina as a private mentor. Trevor also donated his training programs "Transformation" and "Successful Business Startups" to our Online Expat Women Hub. The sales from the programs will fund the development of the Hub. We are also in partnership negotiations with  Fadi Barakat from Malmo City, Sweden, Kate Plaskonis, MINE and CBS where Marina studied graduate level elective business courses. Marina has been invited by Ari Horie to support women in Sweden on the WISE24 committee. Marina has formed partnerships with VATI of Sweden for reeducation/certification of qualified expatriate spouses, and is discussing partnerships with CoderBunnyz - teaching moms to code with kids. She is exploring cooperation possibilities in India where there are large numbers of expatriates.

We are pursuing funding from individuals, foundations, angel investors, and female VC's. We are developing products and services to scale for MNEs worldwide.

Our first funding will be doubled through Nordic funds. We personally funded the startup initial stages and have possibility for business loans. We are seeking investments from industry, venture capital, individuals and philanthropic organizations.

Elevate Prize of 300 000 USD will helps us double/triple our funding for 2021 and prepares us for relevant VC and corporate investments. The Elevate Prize opens doors for us through connecting us to the SOLVE network.

300 000 USD Elevator Prize will cover our 2020 costs. We don't share our financial information publicly as it's confidential.

Access to funds is our greatest barrier to launching our technology and it is to this we focus our attention. We have secured investments for the next stage of our work which we believe we can match in Denmark. However locally, in Sweden, all social impact investments have been frozen.The Elevate Prize is both a strong endorsement of our vision, mission and team and a launchpad to further funding. 

There is great interest in addressing the UN SDGs and we believe the problem we seek to solve and our solution are worthy of investment and endorsement. 

Partnering with the UN, ILO, OECD, leading universities, NGOs, local governments worldwide, European Commission, and MNEs aids our MVP focused on expatriate support. Our international team (Sweden-Dubai-US) will scale up and grow our tech platform globally, providing the only inclusive and tangible expatriate partner support through concrete assistance spanning the entire expatriation process. Our programs, online hub and partnerships help marginalized and longtime unemployed female expatriate spouses/mothers in desperate need of support.

We have identified relevant digital platforms as a strong tech model for our programs and seek contacts with VC investor regarding its further development for expatriate needs. Creating such a platform for expatriate support provides remote work/income to expatriate spouses worldwide.

Our idea is recognized as social innovation in corporate governance/HRDD and is designed to help corporations fulfill Agenda 2030/Millennial Goals to start a new chapter in sustainability reporting in organizational expatriation expanding it beyond the supply chain.

We seek support from the UN/OECD/ILO and European Commission to recognize expat spouses as a vulnerable global group through giving them special status to qualify for work permits worldwide. We also seek specific guidelines for the MNEs and societies to end professional and social marginalization, an unintended negative consequence resulting in 'corporate slavery' infringing  the human rights of expatriate spouses, former and present. This population needs global support and special attention to preserving the employability of each mother with children under 18. 

We seek partnership with "The Elders", "The B Team", Human Rights Watch, Concord, Sweden and MIT SOLVE. We also welcome all MNEs and other sustainable international organizations with globally rotated employees to provide inclusive life and career support to their expatriate families to partner with us for multidimensional shared value creation and to fund our work.

We will build partnerships with the leading universities to create quick access to targeted re-education that leads to business opportunities and employment for expatriate spouses with one or more Master degrees and outstanding intercultural experience.

We welcome all organizations aligned with our mission and capable of adding value to partner with us for SDGs.