youngbusiness.net
Our youngbusiness.net programme, which has been operating successfully for over ten years, is aimed specifically at helping organisations establish sustainable youth enterprise programmes and develop and promote good practice in the field of youth enterprise development.
With dramatically increasing numbers of young people entering labour markets in the next few years, global youth unemployment is set to increase substantially, in both the developing and developed world. Urgent action is needed on all fronts to address this issue.
The youngbusiness.net initiative evolved from the EDW team’s lead role in a multinational project operating in England, Scotland, Spain, Hungary and Poland, running from 1998-2001, to develop methods to support the development and transfer of innovation in the field of youth enterprise and incubation into disadvantaged regions and communities around Europe. The idea for this ground-breaking multinational project evolved from our experience helping Budapest Business Polytechnic, in Hungary, to set up Budapest Youth Enterprise Centre from 1996. This was the first - ‘flagship’ - youth enterprise incubator centre in Central and Eastern Europe.
The techniques deployed through our youngbusiness.net programme have proved to be successful in both urban and rural regions of the UK and mainland Europe. The programme has been so successful that we are now working with partners in Africa, Asia and the Caribbean to develop and establish similar programmes in their countries.
The youngbusiness.net programme uses a holistic model of support to engage with and help young people decide if self-employment is right for them and to provide practical assistance to those who wish to set up their own businesses. The programme is designed to tackle unemployment and under-employment, social exclusion and lack of opportunity for young people, offering solutions to the socio-economic barriers preventing young people from integrating with local or regional labour markets through self-employment.
The programme consists of a wide range of services, from intensive outreach activities, dedicated one-to-one counselling (using a specific methodology), business skills workshops and training courses, to office services and subsidised business premises. This comprehensive ‘all in one’ package of support for the young entrepreneur has been shown to increase dramatically the chances of their businesses surviving during the critical first two to three years of trading.
Through our youngbusiness.net programme, we have helped a range of organisations such as enterprise agencies, educational institutions, regional development agencies and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) set up their youth enterprise initiatives.
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"The poor themselves can create a poverty-free world. All we have to do is to free them from the chains that we have put around them."
Muhammad Yunus