Social Business Day to inspire youth to create jobs

About 1,600 people comprising anti-poverty crusaders, diplomats, entrepreneurs, businesspeople and academics will throng Dhaka today to find solutions to unemployment that is a serious threat to peace and prosperity around the world. 

Participants from 30 countries will gather at Bangabandhu International Conference Centre in Dhaka at the invitation of Yunus Centre, which promotes the ideas and philosophies of Nobel Laureate Prof Muhammad Yunus, to celebrate the sixth Social Business Day.  

Tackling joblessness will be at the heart of the daylong event themed 'We Are Not Job-Seekers, We Are Job-Givers—Turning Unemployment into Entrepreneurship', so people, particularly the youth, does not hanker after jobs and rather, become job-givers.

With over 600 million young people competing for a predicted 200 million jobs over the next decade, there is a danger of widespread social and political unrest. The theme of the annual event is timely as unemployment is rising in Bangladesh, where two million youths join the workforce every year as per official statistics.

The event will show to the world how the new economic theory of social business has started to produce results much earlier than many had expected. 

Participants will include 250 international guests; the highest number of delegates, 58, will come from China, while there will also be a large number of participants from Taiwan, Hong Kong, USA, India and Australia.

A total of 12 concurrent panel discussions will also take place at the same venue. Topics covered will include social businesses in the academic world; methodology of young entrepreneurs programme; financing social business; social business and technology; social business and healthcare; microfinance as social business; social business and youth network; sources of funds for social business; Social Business Design Lab; and Social Business in Greater China.   Yunus, founder of Grameen Bank and 2006 Nobel Peace Prize winner, will make the keynote speech.

Social business is a cause-driven business and seeks to alleviate social problems, including all forms of poverty. In a social business, investors eventually get back only the money they initially invested and they can't take any dividend beyond that point. Profits are reinvested in the business rather than funneled back to shareholders. As microcredit did in the past three decades, his concept of social business has started to become a global example of how to tackle unemployment, with its stepping stones in Bangladesh.

Across the world, small businesses are seen as critical to defeating the triple challenge of poverty, unemployment and inequality. Through the Social Business Design Lab, Yunus Centre has started efforts to help very small initiatives with a possibility of a much bigger impact in individuals' lives and in society.

Since its inception in January 2013, the lab has approved over 1,000 social business projects in the areas of agriculture, environment, power and infrastructure, fashion and fabrics, handicrafts, healthcare and nutrition, information technology and retail business.

A vast majority of the approved projects have been launched by young entrepreneurs, who are running their businesses and creating jobs for others instead of becoming jobseekers. Of them, 730 have already received financing and are running well.

Grameen Kalyan, Grameen Trust, Grameen Telecom Trust and Grameen Shakti Samajik Byabosha Ltd, all set up by Yunus, have provided the equity to the entrepreneurs without taking any interest on their investment.

Projects launched by the children of the members of Grameen Bank will be in focus at the daylong event.

A fair will be organised where about 50 young entrepreneurs would showcase their products and services, sharing their stories of how they are accessing funds to turn their dreams into reality and creating employment for themselves and others.  “Our aim is to give scope to budding entrepreneurs and small businesses, so that they can change their lives and contribute to society,” said Lamiya Morshed, executive director of Yunus Centre. 

She said Prof Yunus has launched the campaign to redirect the creative and energetic youth from the traditional path of hunting for jobs to creating jobs for themselves and others through entrepreneurship.

Internationally, Yunus Social Business (YSB) is spreading the idea of social business.

As of 2014, YSB has supported and financed 25 social businesses across Albania, Brazil, Colombia, Haiti, India, Tunisia and Uganda. Its local country teams have supported over 300 entrepreneurs by sourcing, mentoring and coaching them in our accelerator programmes to help them grow their social businesses.

French company Danone and a growing number of other multinationals have for some time been engaged in social businesses in Bangladesh and other poor countries.

Danone also has launched Action Tank, in initiative where a number of leading multinationals have joined forces with NGOs and government organisations, to experiment with developing social businesses in France. Frances' eye-care company Essilor, construction giant Bouygues, telecommunications group SFR, and carmaker Renault have joined the effort, according to an article of Harvard Business Review.

It said the early results from these companies' experiments suggest that the social business model is both an efficient way of fighting poverty and a productive source of new business ideas. Their ventures are sustainably providing high-quality products and services to very poor people at rock-bottom prices.

A number of agreements will be signed on the sidelines of the event. For instance, a memorandum of understanding will be signed to set up Yunus Social Business Centre at Becker College, USA.

YSB will also be set up at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, a university of technology and design based in Melbourne, Victoria. It aims to partner with Japan Automechanic Ltd and Grameen Australia to develop social business courses, promote social business research and establish an YSBC chapter.

The Yunus Social Business Health Hub at the University of New South Wales in Australia will be set up to help weaker sections of the society, leverage technology for social benefit and collaborate with other YSBs and businesses.

Each year, the world marks June 28 as Social Business Day, to coincide with the birthday of Yunus, the microcredit and social business pioneer. But it has been brought forwarded by a month this year as it falls in the month of Ramadan. The first Social Business Day took place in Dhaka on June 28, 2010.

The gathering is an opportunity to meet, connect, discuss and collaborate with the global social business community with the purpose of developing effective solutions to solve society's most pressing problems.The event will be live at www.socialbusinesspedia.com/live.