20-year-old Dal student, former refugee already has two businesses

Kalab Workye has come a long way since being born in a Kenyan refugee camp, but admits he still has a long way to go to achieve his dreams.

The 20-year-old management student at Dalhousie University is an entrepreneur. He has already started two businesses. At 17, he started a rickshaw advertising company that he later sold to his competitors.

Now, Workye is moving on to his second full season as the owner of Project Painters, a painting company that specializes in interior and exterior painting.

“It’s doing really well and it’s a much better business,” he said. “I was able to take a lot of the knowledge I get from [school] and from my previous experience and apply it into making it a business that can really garner some sales and market share.”

Last season, Project Painters hired seven employees for the summer.

Workye says he’s following in his grandfather’s footsteps. Gebrekidan Berhe was an entrepreneur and owner of hotels and factories in Ethiopia. At the height of Berhe’s career, the communist government seized all of his assets.

“He was very admired and I respect my grandfather a great deal for that,” he said. “At one point when they went to seize his hotel, his pregnant niece who was working for him was murdered because she wouldn’t let the soldiers take his property.”

Workye’s family then fled to a neighbouring Kenyan refugee camp before coming to Canada in 2003.

When Workye landed in Halifax, he remembers having never seen so many trees and how cold it was.

“I never thought I was poor until I came here,” he said. “I fell in love with this country a long time ago. I love this country to death.”

Workye grew up in the Bayers Road public housing area. He says it could have been easy to get into trouble, but adds his mother helped him stay on the right path.

He says walking through hallways of Dalhousie’s Rowe School of Business and seeing photos of some of the most successful people in the province is what drives him. He can see himself one day joining them immortalized in the halls.

Workye said he has high hopes for the Syrian refugees who are entering this country under similar circumstances as he did 12 years ago.

“I have a big feeling there will be a lot more businesses being opened because of them,” he said. “They’ll come here and do what immigrants who come from nothing generally tend to do.”

For more information on Workye and Project Painters, visit www.projectpainters.ca.