Youth Business International is delighted to partner with Riverty and we’d like to take this opportunity to tell you how voting for YBI will help us support young entrepreneurs across Europe and around the world.
Supporting YBI will help us reach our target of supporting of supporting 1 million young entrepreneurs as we celebrate our 25th anniversary.
Access to finance for young entrepreneurs
Our vision is that every ambitious young person can turn their great idea into a successful business, securing their own income and helping boost the economic growth of their community and beyond.
Young entrepreneurs often lack resources, but they rarely lack ambition. Throughout our 25 year history, access to finance has been a consistent constraint for young people wanting to start and grow their business.
Young entrepreneurs, in particular, struggle to scale their ventures due to a lack of targeted support. Youth-led businesses face specific challenges: they typically have limited credit histories, fewer assets to use as collateral, less knowledge of financial practices and services and less access to investment networks compared to their older counterparts.
Evidence shows that financial access alone is not sufficient for young entrepreneurs to succeed and that they need support beyond securing grants or loans. A holistic approach that links the personal and business skills of young entrepreneurs with the right resources is the key.
This is where YBI comes in
Youth Business International offers a range of support and programmes targeted at helping young entrepreneurs improve their financial understanding and access vital funds.
From helping business establish a credit track record and move from the informal to the formal sector in countries like Kenya and Indonesia to equipping young entrepreneurs in countries including Türkiye and the UK, with the tools and resources they need to grow and scale their business and create jobs and economic growth in their communities.
Cathy’s Story
Cathy McSorley – Founder of Mind Connect, aged 29, UK
Cathy Founded Mind Connect as a community interest company that provides mental health support to individuals transitioning out of secondary care. It offers one-to-one and group sessions aimed at preventing relapse and supporting long-term well-being. Her company fills a crucial gap in mental health provision, offering consistent, relationship-based support in the community.
At just 29 years old, Cathy had spent over a decade working in the mental health charity sector, but founding and directing a business was entirely new territory. She faced particular difficulty with the financial side of running a business: “My head would fall off every time we tried to manage the books,” she admitted. While Mind Connect had secured a major contract, Cathy lacked confidence in operating the enterprise month-to-month and needed structured support to build sustainable systems and clarity.
“The peer support sessions, without a doubt, were the most helpful. It’s like networking—but not in a fake way. It’s been so refreshing to sit in a room with a bunch of other women and say ‘I’m exhausted, are you exhausted as well?’ And still come out feeling better and not like you have to pretend everything’s perfect. The strategy stuff helped me think more like a business, and the finance session came at just the right time—it gave me a real confidence boost.”
Cathy is now looking to scale by exploring sustainable funding streams beyond the current contract, including new grants and a membership model inspired by hearing a member of the first cohort speak at a learning session.
Learn more about our work
Browse some of our products and programmes supporting young entrepreneurs navigate and access finance to build and grow businesses for their futures and for the futures of all of us:
- Empower and Elevate
- Unlocking Opportunities for Inclusive Financial Growth
- Policy Paper: De-risking Youth Entrepreneurship and Unlocking the Missing Middle – Solutions to Drive Youth-led Economic Growth
- Policy Paper: Alternative Financing for Informal Businesses to Propel Youth Entrepreneurship in Sub-Saharan Africa
YBI Would like to thank the team at Riverty for choosing us as a partner for their charity giving in 2025 and we wish the team at Riverty and its clients and customers a restful and happy holiday season.
