S4S International

Background of S4S

www.s4s.international 

(Track record overview: https://tinyurl.com/yxycub4r )

S4S is a US, UK and Colombia-based social purpose business and B Corporation whose mission is to use entrepreneurship to help economies grow. We equip local entrepreneurs from all social strata and all parts of the world to develop high growth businesses that create jobs, innovations, new industries, and regional and international trade that leads to economic advances and poverty reduction.

We are a social enterprise certified as a B Corporation. Certified B Corporations are businesses that meet the highest standards of verified social and environmental performance, public transparency, and legal accountability to balance profit and purpose. In addition, we were awarded the global “Best For the World” award, recognizing us as having the most positive overall impact on the populations and communities we serve.

We create local capacity to grow the reservoir of indigenous entrepreneurs by educating educators and equipping local institutions to manage and deliver training at national scale. We advise governments how to build policy regimes and a business environment that maximizes the contribution of entrepreneurial enterprises to sustainable economic growth.

S4S was founded in 2008 and developed by successful entrepreneurs with decades of experience investing in, launching and growing new businesses in rich and poor countries. We’ve translated that experience into business development insights, market entry strategies and problem-solving tools entrepreneurs can easily grasp and employ.

We have developed effective training methods and innovative policies that educators, policymakers, and stakeholders can deploy to foster entrepreneurship and enterprise development.

The quality of our curricula and training methods, our delivery model and our successful outcomes across multiple programs has led S4S to be commissioned to train over 40,000 entrepreneurs from Europe, Latin America and Africa. In the process, we directly advanced the commercial success of many of our entrepreneurs and pioneered an innovative format for effectively channeling seed capital to the most promising startups. The proven value of S4S training programs and approach led the UK’s innovation agency, Innovate UK, to commission S4S in 2014 to develop curricula for and oversee the training of the 1000s of entrepreneurs it supports annually.