Equivalence: Innovation for Migrants in Portugal
Authors: Mariateresa Garrido, Andrea Guadamuz, and Anabell Mora Acevedo
Migration is one of the most complex situations that can be addressed through technology. There are several initiatives to monitor people in the move, but few are concerned with the integration of migrants into society. Equivalence provides an idea on how to innovate to favor people and the Lisbon community.
Given that their idea is closely related to the UPEACE Global Center for Peace Innovation, we invited them to a webinar to share their ideas on migration, innovation, and peace. The Center was established to explore how innovation, technology, and social creativity contribute to peacebuilding.
Through research, training, and partnerships, the Global Center connects scholars, practitioners, and communities while promoting peace and innovation, and this is exactly what we did during the webinar hosted on November 05, 2025.
For the conversation, we welcomed Anabell Mora Acevedo, CEO and Founder of Equivalence, and as a moderator, Andrea Guadamuz, UPEACE Alumna and Program Coordinator at UPEACE’s Office of Humanitarian Assistance. And here, we summarize the rich exchange we had.
The Challenge: Unlocking Underrecognized Talent
Highly skilled migrants often confront an invisible barrier when they arrive in a new country: the sudden loss of professional identity. Degrees, years of experience, and technical expertise frequently become undervalued or misunderstood, producing a structural mismatch between migrants’ actual skills and the opportunities available to them. Across Europe, around four million highly educated migrants are overqualified for their jobs or remain unemployed—an inefficiency that represents nearly €8 billion in lost annual income. This challenge affects individuals and societies alike, especially in countries with aging populations.
The root of this issue is not the absence of talent, but the absence of tools capable of making that talent legible across borders. While many digital initiatives focus on monitoring movement or securing documentation, few help migrants understand how their professional identities translate into a new national context.
This gap is where Equivalence emerges. Led by a multidisciplinary team of migrant women with backgrounds in technology, human resources, journalism, and social impact, the project combines technical expertise with lived experience. Their journeys revealed a persistent reality: crossing a border often renders a person professionally invisible. Instead of accepting this as inevitable, the founders reframed it as an opportunity for innovation—using contextualization to unlock underrecognized talent and support more inclusive societies.
The Equivalent Profile: A Tool for Recognition and Opportunity
At the center of Equivalence is the Equivalent Profile, a digital tool designed to translate professional and academic experience into terms that make sense within the Portuguese context. Rather than replicating formal credential recognition, the tool provides clarity, orientation, and a practical starting point for rebuilding a career after migration.
The Equivalent Profile integrates three interconnected components.
1. Contextualized Professional and Academic Assessment
Equivalence developed a proprietary matrix that evaluates more than 46 variables related to work experience, competencies, and educational background. This analysis generates the Equivalent CV, a contextualized version of a user’s profile that identifies the closest equivalent roles or qualifications in Portugal. While acknowledging that experiences are not identical across countries, the tool highlights their transferable value and offers an approximate equivalence that helps users and employers understand how skills translate locally.
The tool also provides comparative insights and guidance on academic and professional recognition pathways, helping migrants navigate complex systems with greater confidence and efficiency.
2. Personalized Integration Ecosystem
Because integration is relational, the Equivalent Profile recommends events, workshops, networking spaces, and opportunities aligned with users’ goals. This ecosystem-based approach reinforces the idea that integration requires both information and community
3. Identity and Trust Layer
Looking ahead, Equivalence envisions developing a secure identity and trust layer capable of validating key personal information—such as tax, credit, or administrative data—to strengthen reliability between migrants, employers, organizations, and public institutions. This future component aims to support transparency and create the foundations for secure digital identity.
Since the beta launch in March 2025, more than 300 users have joined the pilot, contributing feedback that continuously strengthens the tool.
Impact So Far: From Concept to Community Building
Equivalence achieved a major milestone through Lisboa Innovation for All, the largest social innovation prize in Europe. Organized by the Lisbon City Council, operated by Unicorn Factory Lisboa, and supported by the European Innovation Council, the competition seeks innovative solutions across three categories: Quality of Education, Access to Healthcare, and Integration of Migrants. From more than 320 applications from 40 countries, Equivalence was selected as one of the nine finalists, validating both the urgency of the problem and the potential of its approach. Ultimately, the project won the Integration of Migrants category, securing resources to continue implementing its solution in the city.
Mapping Needs and Designing Integration Plans
Throughout the Proof of Concept, Equivalence worked closely with a first group of highly skilled migrants in Lisbon, gathering insights through the Integration Scale Baseline and the tool’s own assessments. These inputs revealed obstacles often overlooked by traditional metrics: limited networks, difficulties contextualizing experience, and uncertainty around recognition pathways.
By combining this data with human-centered interpretation, the team developed personalized integration plans that offered users contextualized information, clearer pathways for credential recognition, and guidance on relevant events and opportunities in the city. This approach enabled users to rebuild their professional trajectories with clarity and renewed confidence.
Building a Community of Belonging
The project’s impact extended beyond the digital interface. Through multilingual events and collaborative sessions with local organizations, Equivalence helped foster a community where migrants could connect with peers, employers, universities, and municipal actors. These spaces created meaningful opportunities—mentorships, interviews, recognition processes, and participation in training and employability programs.
During the PoC, more than 170 migrants from over 16 nationalities engaged with the project, and satisfaction was reflected in an NPS of 86. Users consistently emphasized that the combination of contextualized information and community connection helped them feel seen within Lisbon’s innovation landscape.
Institutional Recognition and Support
Winning the Integration of Migrants category ensured continued and strengthened the project’s credibility within the city’s broader innovation and social inclusion agenda. The involvement of the Câmara Municipal de Lisboa and the network of actors supporting the prize played a meaningful role in transforming Equivalence from an idea rooted in lived experience into a validated solution ready for broader implementation.
Conclusions: Innovation for Peace from the Integration of Migrants
The conversation with the UPEACE Global Center for Peace Innovation highlighted a fundamental truth: integration, when rooted in recognition and dignity, contributes directly to peacebuilding. By helping migrants understand and communicate the value of their experience, Equivalence addresses one of the most structural yet overlooked barriers in the migration journey.
Recognition is an act of peace
When we see and value the other as equal in dignity and potential, we dissolve the invisible borders that divide us. The Equivalent Profile helps restore professional identity not by changing who people are, but by returning context to their stories, context that is often lost the moment a person crosses a border.
When deployed with a rights-based and gender-responsive lens, technology supports safer access to information, strengthens community networks, and enables forms of participation that are otherwise limited by mobility, distance, or insecurity.
Innovation is not only tech. It is relational.
Throughout the Proof of Concept, Equivalence demonstrated that meaningful innovation emerges from connection: systems connecting with people, and people connecting with opportunities to rebuild their lives with dignity. The tool’s impact did not come solely from algorithms or matrices, but from the relationships, networks, and communities that formed around it.
In this case, technology becomes not only a tool but a bridge that helps close persistent gaps, even amid significant challenges. Despite barriers related to access, digital literacy and structural exclusion, this initiative demonstrates how elements of the so-called Industry 4.0 can be strategically used to expand opportunities for those who sustain daily life, particularly women, migrants, caregivers and grassroots defenders.
Peace is built through inclusion.
When societies embrace diversity—mixing worlds, cultures, and perspectives—they create the conditions where belonging becomes possible and peace can take root. Equivalence contributes to this process by opening doors that many migrants find closed: access to recognition, meaningful networks, and institutions that understand their potential.
Ultimately, Equivalence shows that the integration of migrants is not only a policy challenge—it is an opportunity to strengthen communities, expand innovation, and build more peaceful and equitable societies.
Women as drivers of digital and social change
This initiative also carries a profound significance from a gender and intersectional perspective. It highlights how women, in their diverse and overlapping identities, continue to play a central role in advancing human rights and strengthening social protection systems, especially in contexts marked by mobility, care responsibilities, and structural inequalities.
Through their everyday practices, women and gender-diverse leaders weave connections across sectors and levels, in this particular case linking community actors, civil society organizations, institutions, and international partners. In doing so, they embody an emancipatory governance: leadership grounded in lived experience, care, solidarity, and the defense of dignity.
Ultimately, the initiative shows that innovation is most transformative when it emerges from the ground up, informed by the realities of people who must navigate complex risks while caring for their families and communities. By centering their agency, knowledge and leadership, the project contributes not only to digital inclusion, but also to a broader vision of justice and resilience—one in which women in all their diversities are recognized as key actors in shaping more equitable and peaceful societies.
Author’s Short Bio
Mariateresa Garrido is the Deputy Director of the UPEACE Global Center for Peace Innovation.
Andrea Guadamuz is a UPEACE Alumna and Program Coordinator at UPEACE’s Office of Humanitarian Assistance.
Anabell Mora Acevedo is the CEO and Founder of Equivalence
