The Youth Ventures program empowers disadvantaged and unemployed youth to create sustainable businesses that can provide employment for themselves and others.

We are a next-generation incubator for young entrepreneurs.

The youth unemployment crisis in MENA gave birth to the Arab Spring and Greenside Development Foundation's Youth Ventures pilot program in Morocco. Nearly 50% of Moroccan youth between the ages of 15 and 29 are neither in school nor employed (World Bank).

Both government and NGO programs in Morocco lack a holistic model for self-employment that can be replicated to serve this vast population of jobless and disenfranchised youth.

GDF serves both educated and illiterate unemployed youth between 18 and 30, with an emphasis on especially disadvantaged young women.

Our program provides an intense, three-stage intervention for aspiring but jobless youth. The program begins with Entrepreneurship training in business planning, during which time youth participants develop a plan for their own small and micro-enterprises. Viable business plans and motivated youth are selected and funded with interest-free loans to purchase the materials needed to begin their businesses. After the launch of their enterprises, we provide each Young Entrepreneur with a Business Management Consultant that provides individualized and on-site support focused on the capacity development of the Young Entrepreneur and the profitability of the business.

Problem

Our program seeks to build dynamic and trained young entrepreneurs that can create new businesses and employment in Morocco. Our clients are the unemployed youth of Morocco, those that become more impoverished and less hopeful every day. This population is enormous; nearly 50% of Moroccan youth between the ages of 15 and 29 are neither in school nor employed, according to the International Finance Corporation (IFC). This is the legacy of the Arab Spring that began in North Africa, birthed in the struggle of disenfranchised youth to change their futures. Their need is incredible, and these unemployed youth are fragile, having met with failure in their previous ventures into the world of employment. This young population has a pressing need for work; without quality job offers from existing businesses, unemployed youth are left with few other choices than the daunting prospect of entrepreneurship. With no social safety net like welfare or Medicaid, these youth must take care of themselves financially, and for most that means starting their own business. In Morocco, the major non-profit microfinance organizations still exclude unemployed youth from their services, leaving few options open to would-be young entrepreneurs. Both the government and aid agencies are too risk-adverse to provide a holistic program for young entrepreneurs. We designed the Youth Ventures program based on best-practices in small business development and a passion for these youth.

Solution

The Youth Ventures program is one-of-its-kind in Morocco: we are a holistic program that provides hands-on training, direct access to interest-free financing, and individualized, on-going consulting to aspiring young entrepreneurs. Greenside Development Foundation begins each phase of its Youth Ventures Program with a careful screening of motivated and promising Young Entrepreneurs (YE's) in the communities it serves, with a particular focus on women (currently, 72% of clients). During a month-long entrepreneurship training, candidates produce comprehensive business plans with the help of the GDF's Business Management Consultants (BMC). Greenside then selects the candidates who meet our criteria (aged 17-35 and unemployed) and with the most promise (motivated, trust-worthy, and capable, but not necessarily educated) and provides an unsecured, interest-free loan of 1,000-5,000 Dirham ($125-625 USD). The BMC is the backbone of the Youth Ventures program, providing one-on-one, on-site training and consulting to develop Young Entrepreneurs and their enterprises. BMCs and the Young Entrepreneurs work together to set the microenterprise’s goals, identify market trends, opportunities and risks, create and manage action plans, record expenses and revenues, budget for the future, launch marketing campaigns, and constantly update the microenterprise’s accounting. After reimbursing the loan, YE's can either start a new enterprise or expand and develop their existing one.

Example

Fatiha's husband left her when she was 25 years old, jobless and penniless. She was forced to move in with her parents, stretching their already limited resources. Three years later of informal-sector, off-and-on work, she joined Greenside Development Foundation's Youth Ventures pilot program. Fatiha came to us determined to plan for a better future for herself and her family. She had helped raise her grandfather's sheep as a child in the countryside, and had an idea to start her own flock. Her family has a yard next to their domicile that Fatiha thought would be a perfect space, and joined the first group of Young Entrepreneurs to prepare a business plan for her enterprise. She then took our Exhibiting Entrepreneurial Qualities survey and was selected for a interest-free loan of 3,965 Dirhams (about $450 USD) and went with our Business Management Consultant Ali Aaouine to purchase 7 sheep, three grown females and their four young. Fatiha has borrowed a male sheep from her Business Mentor to mate with her flock, while she raises the young for sale. She plans to sell these youth eventually to add more mothers to her flock. She works with her Business Management Consultant to learn how to document her expenses to make sure she is keeping her costs in line, while together they monitor the livestock market for an advantageous time to sell the male youth. Even though she is semi-illiterate, she is learning general business management skills, such as basic accounting, creating action plans, timelines, market research techniques, and how to monitor her business through SWOT analyses. Fatiha is learning what to focus on and how to take appropriate actions to assure the health of her enterprise. With the reimbursement of her loan, she hopes to qualify for an expansion loan to add to her flock until she can create a living wage for herself.

Marketplace

The Youth Ventures program has no direct competition, in that no one organization in Morocco incubates young entrepreneurs in a holistic way. However, some of the program elements exist in other government and NGO programs. Morocco's microfinance sector, organizations such as Al Amana and FONDEP, completely excludes our population of young, jobless entrepreneurs because of the very fact that they lack income and assets for collateral. This makes loans from family and friends the only real competition for Youth Ventures' loans, and even then those loans often come with the expectation of interest, which further cuts into a budding young entrepreneur's bottom line. Youth Ventures' entrepreneurship and business planning training compete with the government program ANAPEC which provides similar training around the country. However, according to a recent World Bank report, only 8% of unemployed youth who know of ANAPEC use its services. Some NGOs offer regional trainings, but they are geared towards high-school students, not to the actually unemployed youth out of school. The business development support and on-site consulting we provide to young entrepreneurs through our BMCs does not exist in Morocco yet. They cannot get this vital support anywhere else, and Youth Ventures was built around this need. Our organization believes that finding the right BMCs and the money to put them to work with the huge demand for the pilot program is paramount in our expansion.