YBI launches Green & Social Entrepreneurship Month

Throughout our global network, we are seeing more and more young entrepreneurs build businesses that deliver profit with purpose. They are the entrepreneurs working to solve some of the greatest environmental and social challenges of our time and will play a vital role in creating a more equitable and sustainable world for us all.

It is our ambition to provide these young green and social entrepreneurs with the support they need to grow and sustain their businesses and we are on a journey with our global network to develop the most effective approaches, methodologies and tools to achieve this goal. As part of this work, we are excited to launch our first ever Green & Social Entrepreneurship Month, dedicated to supporting and celebrating young green and social entrepreneurs around the world. Find out what we have planned below:

Developing tailored support for young green and social entrepreneurs

Young green and social entrepreneurs have specific needs that entrepreneurship support organisations need to cover in their support offerings. These range from reconciling passion and purpose with profit to deciding on a legal form for the business, defining a theory of change and measuring impact, to name a few.

This month, we are launching several publications and initiatives to help our members meet these specific needs in their support for young green and social entrepreneurs. This includes our Social and Green Entrepreneurship Toolkit – a collection of useful resources and tools for entrepreneurship support organisations, exclusively available to our members.

To leverage our global network’s expertise and experience in supporting young green and social entrepreneurs, we are hosting a series of regional member workshops on green and social entrepreneurship in the first week of April. Each workshop will bring together our members from the respective region to share how they are currently supporting young green and social entrepreneurs, identify challenges and existing solutions, and brainstorm ideas to address remaining challenges. Building on these discussions, we will launch a Community of Practice on Green and Social Entrepreneurship to continuously learn from each other about this important topic.

In addition to the above, we are looking forward to launching our positioning paper ‘ Shaping A More Inclusive, Equitable and Sustainable Future: Supporting young social and green entrepreneurs’ at the end of April. The paper shares our definition of a green or social enterprise, explores the specific support young green and social entrepreneurs need to succeed and defines our role in driving social and green youth entrepreneurship – watch this space for the launch coming soon.

Celebrating young green and social entrepreneurs from our global network

22nd of April marks Earth Day, an annual event to raise awareness and demonstrate support for environmental protection. This year’s theme is #InvestInOurPlanet – a bid to governments, businesses and the public to put our planet first and work together for a sustainable future. Many of the young entrepreneurs supported through our global network are doing exactly that – investing in our planet through their business. On Earth Day and throughout April we will be sharing their inspiring stories across our channels – and you can already meet some of them below:

• Esrat, Fatiha and Sabiha are three young entrepreneurs from Bangladesh running sustainable Jute businesses, a biodegradable, sustainably grown material that benefits the environment and the rural economy of Bangladesh – read more about them here.
• Marta, Herbert and the Rokani Social Cooperative are addressing social and environmental problems in Mozambique, Uganda and Greece through their businesses – find out how in this blog.

Watch this space for more inspiring stories of young green and social entrepreneurs coming soon.

Picture: Jackline Njeru & employees, Pistis Threads & Stitches, Nairobi, Kenya, supported by YBI member Sinapis.