Yunus Social Business Funds

Yunus Social Business Funds (YSB) is an international advisory and implementation non-profit organisation focusing on creating social businesses worldwide. A social business is a new kind of organization that combines the strengths of both civil society and the business world. Social businesses have a social or environmental mission – like NGOs – but are financially self-sustainable – like businesses. YSB Funds was co-founded by Saskia Bruysten, Sophie Eisenmann, and Nobel Peace Laureate Muhammad Yunus, founder of the microfinancing organization Grameen Bank as well as a variety of Social Businesses in Bangladesh and worldwide.

We at YSB are currently a team of 20 people with backgrounds in strategy consulting, venture capital, entrepreneurship, civil society, and international development. A social business (and non-profit organisation) ourselves, we report directly to Prof. Yunus, and we are part of the Grameen network of over 40 social businesses and more than 50,000 employees. Grameen/Yunus projects, in microfinance and in social business, have been implemented in more than 50 countries around the world. Our main office is in Frankfurt, Germany; our country offices include Albania, Haiti, and Brazil, with two more country offices (Tunisia, Togo) to be opened in the near future.

We have two main fields of activity: Implementation and management of Social business incubator fund and social business movements, and Social business advisory services. Activities in the area of Social business incubator fund specifically are the following:

• We design and implement programmes to generate, strengthen and scale up social business ideas in a defined geographic area (country, region or city).
• The cornerstones of each programme are a social business incubator (e.g. identifying and helping to develop high-potential social business ideas or pilots) and an investment fund for social businesses (the methodologies are similar to those used by venture capital).
• We also deploy social business plan competitions and other activities that help to generate awareness and enthusiasm, and ultimately feed into the pipeline of new social business entrepreneurs and projects
• We are currently implementing incubator funds / movements in Haiti, Albania, Colombia, India, Brazil, Tunisia, and Uganda.