Toolkits

Building the next generation of responsible businesses and leaders

YBI’s brief shares our learning and sets out our recommendations to help young entrepreneurs embed decent work principles into their businesses.

In our experience, while young entrepreneurs want what is best for their employees and care about their workforce, there are limited materials and resources designed specifically for them which address the barriers faced in implementing decent work principles into their businesses. In many cases, this means that individual entrepreneurs and micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs), especially in emerging markets, often rely on informal practices which don’t create a positive decent work environment. Our recent work has set out to address this challenge.

As part of our role as a champion for decent work, we led a pilot project, supported by the IKEA Foundation and with the help of Catalystas Consulting. We set out to understand decent work in the Indian and Bangladeshi context alongside YBI members Bangladesh Youth Enterprise Advice and Help Centre (B’YEAH) and Bharatiya Yuva Shakti Trust (BYST).

In the brief Building the next generation of responsible businesses and leaders, we share our learning from the pilot and set out our recommendations. We will continue to roll out the decent work curriculum across our memberships and look for new ways to embed understanding of decent work in other services, such as mentoring.