Youth Business International

About YBI 

Youth Business International (YBI) is the global network of expert organisations in over 45 countries supporting underserved young entrepreneurs to turn their ideas into successful businesses, creating jobs and strengthening communities. 

Young people are a critical resource. However, with 71 million young people currently unemployed across the world, this potential is not being realised. Furthermore, of those that are working, many do not earn enough to lift themselves out of poverty.

Addressing the youth employment crisis is imperative, not only for the well-being of young people but also to ensure sustainable, inclusive growth and social cohesion globally.

Empowering young people to succeed in self-employment is part of the solution. Young entrepreneurs create new jobs and shape local economies. Young people equipped with entrepreneurship skills are better able to navigate the challenges of today’s rapidly changing job market.

What we do

We connect and support expert organisations (our members), partners and young people to develop and scale new solutions to the critical challenges facing underserved young entrepreneurs. As a result, our members deliver better quality support to more young people.

Over the last three years (2015 - 2017), the YBI network has supported 175,445 young people with entrepreneurship training and helped 64,637 young people to start or grow a business. In total, 427,402 young people have been engaged through outreach activities.

YBI’s Network Team in London and Bogota facilitates network activity to:

LEARN: Building impactful organisations. Our members have diverse expertise across the full range of youth entrepreneurship support services. We deliver training and other capability development support, facilitate member learning exchanges and connect members to partners with relevant expertise. For example, we recently engaged one of our members in the UK, UnLtd, to design and deliver social entrepreneurship training across the network, from Germany to Mongolia.

INNOVATE: Developing new products and services. By convening the collective expertise of the network, we can identify gaps in support for young entrepreneurs, not just in one market but around the world. Using this insight, we work with members to develop new solutions. For example, we are supporting members in Europe to develop a digital platform to increase market access for young entrepreneurs.

INFLUENCE: Generating and leveraging evidence. As a global network we are well positioned to address the lack of robust evidence on youth entrepreneurship. We work with members to undertake research on priority themes and use the learning to drive change in policy and practice. For example, we are currently conducting longitudinal research on the impact of mentoring with the University of Middlesex. The findings will be shared in national and international forums.