Using 20 years of experience and expertise, Youth Business International’s (YBI) ‘Entrepreneurship Within Reach’ report emphasised the urgent need for youth entrepreneurship in response to the rising youth unemployment rates and the worsening effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Our report signified that to fulfil their full potential, young entrepreneurs need support in three key areas: personal development, business development and enabling environment facilitation.
Personal development: building positive mindsets and attitudes via mentoring, soft and life skills, training and increasing leadership capabilities.
Our global network has found that mentoring is an essential aspect of personal development, with more than 34,000 young entrepreneurs being matched with a mentor since 2014. Mentoring enables personal reflection, helping to develop mental strength and positive self-worth. Many of our members have established mentoring programmes, like Habitat in Turkey. They created an online community where young women entrepreneurs had the opportunity to attend training and mentoring sessions, as well as establishing a safe space for emotional support.
Business development: technical training, guidance on how to start and grow a successful business, and ongoing aftercare.
To inspire young entrepreneurs to reach their full potential, training on hard skills is needed to build a business. For instance, our member Alianca Emprendedora in Brazil provides three different trainings; a ‘Go for it’ programme for beginners, a ‘Sink or Swim’ programme for business owners looking to improve specific skills, and the alumni programme named ‘And we’re off!’ Through frequent assessments throughout the programmes, young individuals can observe their entrepreneurial readiness develop and put their training into practice.
Enabling environment facilitation focuses on access to finance and markets to provide opportunities that are otherwise inaccessible to most young entrepreneurs.
The 2020 UN World Youth Report highlighted the challenges faced by young people pursuing entrepreneurship in obtaining finance due to lack of credibility and experience, as well as inexperience when attempting to navigate market dynamics.
Our global network works endlessly to eliminate financial barriers that could prevent young people from reaching their entrepreneurial potential. Our member in India, BYST, has memoranda of understandings (MoUs) with several financial institutions, allowing easy access for entrepreneurs to lending options. Our Nigerian member FATE Foundation works with banks to offer affordable funding to startups. Since 2014, the YBI network has connected more than 82,000 young entrepreneurs to financial services.
Our global network is proud to have supported more than 642,000 young entrepreneurs through providing guidance for personal development, business development and enabling environment facilitation.
You can read our ‘Entrepreneurship Within Reach’ report to find out more about how our network supports young entrepreneurs to fulfil their potential here: https://www.youthbusiness.org/file_uploads/Entrepreneurship-within-reach—Connecting-young-people-to-opportunity.pdf
