In Greece’s tough job market, non-profits offer refugee lifeline

Bowed over a large workbench with a dozen classmates, asylum-seeker Fazle Rabbi is learning how to construct a network cable, hoping to boost his job prospects in Greece.

“If I get good marks from this academy, I think I will get (a job) as an IT technician,” the 18-year-old Bangladeshi said, pliers in hand.

Rabbi is among dozens attending vocational and entrepreneurship courses at Odyssea, a non-profit that is one of Greece’s leading job advisers to refugees and other vulnerable persons.

In an upstairs classroom, another group is learning how to operate wood-carving machinery software.

Based in the industrial district of Rentis near Piraeus, Odyssea since 2016 has assisted around 2,500 beneficiaries either through courses or follow-up support, with another 3,000 applicants currently seeking to join.

Founded soon after over a million Syrians, Afghans, Iraqis and other persons fleeing conflict arrived in Europe, the group -- named after Homer’s epic of adversity -- helps to prepare job seekers for the arduous task of finding employment in post-crisis Greece.

Odyssea focuses on “people who feel they don’t have equal opportunities to socially integrate, who feel discriminated against,” said Thodoris Kostoulas, a mechanical engineer and programme manager in the group.

After a decade-long crisis, unemployment in Greece is still officially 13 per cent -- 28 per cent among those aged under 25. And while over 6,000 refugees in Greece have followed six-month integration courses supervised by the International Organization for Migration, tens of thousands of asylum seekers are not eligible for such support.