World Youth Skills Day: Equipping young entrepreneurs with the skills to grow more impactful businesses

At Youth Business International (YBI), we always advocate for sustainable and inclusive youth entrepreneurship. Equipping underserved young people with the skills, confidence, and connections they need to beat the odds and become successful, responsible business owners is a critical lever for economic recovery and resilience. 
 

World Youth Skills Day

The UN has declared 15th July as World Youth Skills Day, a moment to focus on the strategic importance of equipping young people with skills for employment, decent work, and entrepreneurship. The theme for 2023 is ‘Skilling teachers, trainers and youth for a transformative future’, and we want to take this opportunity to celebrate our members as a high-quality resource for young entrepreneurs. 
 
Last year, 123,540 young people benefited from training delivered by YBI members. Olukoya Glory, one of the young entrepreneurs who participated in FATE Foundation’s Aspiring Entrepreneurs Programme under the Futuremakers project, said that the training helped her grow in many ways. “In every session, I have had to unlearn, learn, and relearn. I love how each class had something new to add to not just my business but also my life as an individual.” Supported by Standard Chartered, this training has helped her launch her business Fabric Hunters sooner than expected and has given her confidence in her business vision and mission.

In the last year, YBI has also released both an inclusivity toolkit – a powerful resource for our global network to put inclusivity into practice so that they are better placed to encourage it in the youth businesses they work with – as well as decent work training carried out initially by our members Bharatiya Yuva Shakti Trust (BYST) in India and Bangladesh Youth Enterprise Advice & Helpcentre (B’YEAH), supported by IKEA Foundation. By August 2022, over 1,200 young entrepreneurs had completed the training and reported intention to implement decent work principles in their businesses. 
 

Upskilling our network for the benefit of young entrepreneurs

“It is YBI’s goal to equip young entrepreneurs with the skills and tools that they need to start and grow successful, sustainable and impactful businesses,” says our head of training, Carol Appel. “We do that by co-creating new pieces of training, products and services with our global network of members that can be embedded in their current support offering to young entrepreneurs, such as decent work and social and green entrepreneurship.” 
 

By building the skills and capabilities of our members and bringing them together to learn from each other and collaborate, the YBI network can deliver more inclusive and impactful youth entrepreneurship support. With the right training, underserved and young entrepreneurs become champions of sustainable, environmentally conscious businesses, providing decent work and better opportunities for others.