Geneva has become an incubation hub for citizen initiatives
Innovative individual initiatives are sprouting up in Geneva to tackle the new challenges the city – and the world – are facing. SWI swissinfo.ch looks at three of these and the people behind them. Rocio Restrepo fled Colombia and arrived in Switzerland in 1999 with two university degrees and years of professional experience in her pocket. She was told her qualifications were not valid and was unable to integrate into the labour market in Geneva. Rather than blame society, she decided to raise awareness among government agencies and companies on immigrant women who have a vast professional expertise and how they can be integrated professionally. “I decided to go out to meet women with similar experiences (80 women in the beginning) to learn from them and then created the association Découverte (meaning discovery) to fight the waste of professional expertise,” Restrepo said in an interview. The first years of the association were difficult. Découverte did not receive any...