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Y Goshti is well-known as the very first social business incubator in Bangladesh. The journey of YY Goshti was started on 18th February 2016. This company was created by around 20 graduates who used to believe the social business’s power.
They try to connect people, groups, or organisations, bring out social changes, and improve situations of the business world. They mainly aim at making an affirmative change by ending poverty by reducing carbon emission and creating employment.
YY Goshti: Intensive Education for Social Business
Through their website, early-stage people that they had started this journey to help themselves and their friends to get food and earn by jobs, and also used providing resources so that their entrepreneur friends could gather courage and start their own businesses.
36 youths from the Goshti (Family) have provided 1108 jobs throughout the country and made lives better of more than 80 thousand people. Now that target is to reach a number of one million. Since 2017, they have supported 36 startups and connected 17000+ young people through social entrepreneurship programs.
Here is what Dr. Muhammad Yunus (Nobel Prize Winner and the founder of “Grameen Bank”) said about YY Goshti, “YY Goshti energizes everybody, helps everybody to think differently, think fresh, bring out new ideas, who knows one of these ideas will completely change the world.”
The YY Goshti organises four-month-long training every year, where ten teams get selected to take part. Netherlands Enterprise Agency and the “Grameen” family are the supporters of this program.
Some other partners of YY Goshti are – The YY (Younus+You) Foundation, Grameen Telecom Trust, EMK Center, The Grameen Creative Lab, PUM (Netherlands Senior Experts), UNDP, Younus Centre, etc. The chairman of the YY Goshti is Lamiya Morshed and Khalid Hossain is the director.
Through this training, early-stage entrepreneurs get chances to meet experienced advisors and investors, learn early-stage methods. Entrepreneurs learn about materializing their incredible ideas through this program. The participants get many facilities like –
- World-Class training
- Expert Mentoring
- Investor Network
- Office/Work Space
- Business Service
- Community
- Account and Legal Counselling
- Seed Funding
Finally, they get ready to turn their minimum viable product (MVP) into investable.
The YY Goshti works on improving water and food supply and maintaining peace in Bangladesh. Their recent project named “Shishir Water” was launched to provide water to more than 2000 underprivileged people of disadvantaged families.
Normally rich people have to buy 20 liters water by spending 40 takas, but the “Shishir Water” project offers the same quantity of water to the poor with only 10 takas. Another project is for supporting 25 former soldiers to create their own social businesses.
Some of their other successful projects are “Garbageman”, “Avijatrik”, “Tiger Bow”, “Nagarkrishi”, “Shoyong” etc. They’re also providing support to the young entrepreneurs who are constantly working to produce artisan milk and sunflower oil.
They have set a target to implement 100 projects in the next 5 years. In the near future, YY Gosthi will collaborate with the United Nations Food and Culture Organisation. This will turn YY Gosthi into the very first international startup incubator of Bangladesh.
The Founder and Managing Director of YY Goshti, Shazeeb M. Khairul Islam, in an interview, said that-
“It’s okay to fail, but make sure you adapt.”
Well, that’s very valuable advice for young entrepreneurs. And in life too, nobody should give up by getting scared of failures, rather should adapt according to the changes.
He also said that it’s always more important to focus on learning new things by accepting failures and it’s always okay to ask for help.