Yunus Social Business (YSB) was created in 2011 with a focus on growing and financing social businesses worldwide, believing in the power of business to end poverty. YSB funds support the growth of social businesses that provide employment, education, healthcare, clean water and clean energy to over 9 million people in East Africa, Latin America & India.
Yunus Social Business provides :
- Tailor-made, patient, affordable loans for social enterprises to grow and scale their social impact.
- Hands-on growth support and coaching for early-stage social entrepreneurs
- Ecosystem building and engagement of peer investors
The IKEA Foundation works towards creating a better life, believing in the idea that only through jobs and income can people lift themselves out of poverty.
The IKEA Foundation and Yunus Social Business (YSB) share a vision of empowering entrepreneurs in developing economies and formed a three-year partnership (2019-2022) for “Promoting Entrepreneurship in Developing Economies” in India and Kenya.
The two organisations have been working in partnership to offer both financial and non-financial support to social business. They aim to promote entrepreneurship to enable investees scale up their operations, grow their businesses and improve their operational capacities. At the same time, they aim to encourage more investors to allocate capital and support to social businesses.
Our role
Itad is currently conducting an evaluation of YSB’s support to social businesses and eco-system players in India and Kenya as well as impact measurement and management (IMM) capacity development support.
Our evaluation will produce independent evidence and insights to understand the contribution and additionality of YSB’s services to intended outcomes and impacts – as articulated in the theory of change – and to generate insights about the interventions’ pathways to impact. Through these insights, the evaluation will enable YSB to refine and strengthen its intervention models going forward, enabling it to better address the unmet financial and non-financial support needs for enterprises to generate higher incomes.
For the IMM component Itad developed Business Impact Models (BIMs). We conducted interviews with social businesses, created the BIMs and we revised YSB’s overarching Theory of Change. Itad ‘s evaluation team completed this process for each of the 7 social businesses. The business models were intended to map out beneficiaries and aspirational impact. The BIMs also helped us to map out the contribution of each social business against the overarching YSB theory of change.
For the qualitative assessment component, our evaluation team conducted interviews and looked at the financial and non-financial support YSB has given to social businesses. For the quantitative assessment, we are conducting a beneficiary survey in India and Kenya to understand the contribution and additionality of YSB services to SBs.
