Youth Entreprenurship and Sustainability (YES)

Youth Entrepreneurship and Sustainability (YES) Campaign, Inc. is an international non-profit headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts. YES leads an action oriented initiative that responds to the enormous global challenge of youth unemployment through a youth leadership and enterprise-based model. A major new goal for YES is to establish Youth Enterprise Generators in its network countries to build local capacity for providing entrepreneurship education and business development services. The Enterprise Generator will work to build skills, create opportunity, and provide market-based entrepreneurial solutions for youth enterprise development which is central to our efforts. Currently YES has youth-led networks in over 50 countries, in various stages of development. Each country is provided with technical support and coaching that provides them with leadership and entrepreneurship training. The YES effort began in 1998, and the Campaign was launched in 2002. Till December 2006, YES was a project of Education Development Center, Inc. and became an independent non-profit in Jan 2007.

Our two major objectives are:

1. Agenda Setting: Placing the issue of youth employment on the global agenda through global and regional Summits and national workshops. Since 2002, the lives of over one million youth have been impacted by our programs, which have included five Global Summits (in Egypt, Mexico, Kenya, Azerbaijan and Sweden), four Regional Forums (in India, Paraguay Panama and Brazil), 400 projects all over the world, the launch of over 50 YES Country Networks, and the publication of more than 150 original works.

2. Building an entrepreneurial culture: Working with universities and other local actors to provide entrepreneurship education, business development services, training, mentoring and linking with finance and markets in a system we call Youth Enterprise Generators.