Youth Business International (YBI)’s mission is to support young people to start, grow and sustain their businesses – enabling them to create jobs, build communities and transform lives.
Young people are critical to future economic development and key to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals. However, with 66 million unemployed youth worldwide and 145 million young workers living in poverty, this potential is not being realised. 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.
Established in 2000, YBI brings together organisations with aligned goals to develop and scale the most effective solutions to the critical challenges facing young entrepreneurs and catalyse positive change in entrepreneurship culture.
YBI unlocks young people’s potential and turns job seekers into job creators. Our goal is to reach 1 million young people by 2025.
Since 2014 we have supported over 350,000 young people to start or grow a business by delivering a range of practical entrepreneurship support services, from guiding a young person to register a new business and improving their bookkeeping skills to helping them write a business plan or grow their fledgling business through facilitating access to finance.
Our members and partners operate in over 60 countries around the world. They are diverse, ranging from training organisations, microfinance institutions, mentoring specialists to business associations and incubators. Locally rooted and locally led, members combine deep contextual knowledge with YBI’s sector-leading, global expertise and tools.
YBI is supported by the Network Team, based in London, UK. This small, passionate team are committed to equipping members with the most effective solutions to empower youth with the right tools to start and grow sustainable businesses. As a network, we learn, innovate and influence together to drive impact for young entrepreneurs and their communities.
We deliver training and other capacity development support to facilitate learning exchanges and connect members to partners with relevant expertise. We convene the collective expertise of the network to identify gaps in support for young entrepreneurs and collaborate to develop solutions. We work with members to undertake research on priority themes and use these learnings to drive change in policy and practice.
