YY Goshti: Making waves in social business

Considered as Bangladesh's first social business incubator, YY Goshti was started with the mission to provide social business entrepreneurs with all the resources that they need.

Young entrepreneurs have many creative and innovative ideas, but due to the lack of resources, these ideas do not always turn into promising businesses. Bearing that in mind, YY Goshti offers extensive entrepreneurship programmes for budding social businesses. They are known for their nine-month immersive social business incubator programme that helps new entrepreneurs to make progress in their businesses.  

YY Goshti has partnered with some of the largest social business funders and impact investors in Bangladesh. Some of their partners include Yunus Centre, Grameen Telecom Trust, The Grameen Creative Lab, EMK Center, Yunus& You- The YY Foundation, PUM Netherlands and Bangladesh Venture Capital Ltd.

Lamiya Morshed is the chairman of the YY Goshti team with Shazeeb M Khairul Islam as the founder and the managing director, Akkie Okma as the technical advisor and Khalid Hossain as the director.

YY represents Yunus+ You. They were inspired by Professor Yunus's vision of eradicating poverty.  After serving as the president at Social Business Youth Alliance (SBYA) for years, Shazeeb M Khairul Islam, also the founding CEO of YGAP Bangladesh founded YY Goshti in 2016.

YY Goshti offers intensive, rapid mentorship programmes, facilitated by noted social business entrepreneurs. They also provide a modern, interactive workspace for social businesses. Their office space is a creative hub for social business enthusiasts. New incubated projects are also offered a slot in this hub. YY Goshti also renders business services like accounting, marketing, creative design, business linkage, and technology solutions for these businesses.  Other major services of YY Goshti include consultation on network building and access to social business funds.

Since their inception, YY Goshti has helped 30 social business entrepreneurs and created 750 jobs. Their most successful and acclaimed projects are Shishir Water, Avijatrik, Garbageman, Tiger Bow, Shoyong,Nagarkrishi and Oggro Dairy.

Shishir Water provides 2000 underprivileged people with clean safe drinking water in rural areas of Bangladesh. Avijatrik introduced community-based tourism in Bangladesh for the first time.

YY Goshti soon will collaborate with the Food & Agricultural Organisation of the United Nations, in partnership with Yunus Centre and Caritas Centrafrique, to launch a social business incubation programme and help create a training centre for the distressed youth in the Central African Republic. With this venture, YY Goshti will be the first international Bangladeshi start-up incubator.