The Prince’s Youth Business International

The Prince’s Youth Business International (YBI) champions youth enterprise by growing a global network which provides young people with the opportunity to start their own business.

YBI supports the network by helping it to develop the organisation’s proven model of assisting young entrepreneurs through access to credit, volunteer business mentors and business start-up support. When a young entrepreneur turns for help from one of the organisations in the YBI Network, he or she knows that it will meet high standards of competence, performance and trust.

YBI’s goal is to have grown its network to make it capable of supporting 100,000 new entrepreneurs each year by 2020, and that by then the entrepreneurs helped by the network will have created in total one million jobs. In 2008, the network supported nearly 7,000 entrepreneurs – bringing the total number of entrepreneurs supported to 97,000 and providing employment to hundreds of thousands of people.

YBI works in partnership with world leading businesses and other bodies, including Accenture, Barclays Capital, the International Youth Foundation and the United States Agency for International Development, helping them to achieve their own goals and making their expertise, resources and influence available to the YBI Network. In this way, YBI connects young entrepreneurs with powerful players in global society.

YBI was founded in 2000 and became one of The Prince’s Charities in 2008. Download a copy of the 2008 YBI Annual Report here.

Read the shortlist for YBI Entrepreneur of the Year Award 2009 here.

Watch a film about YBI's work here.