The extent of the damage caused by the COVID-19 pandemic is, frankly, bewildering. For us at Yunus Social Business, both as individuals and as an organisation, 2020 was a year that posed huge challenges.
In the midst of these setbacks, one thing has brought us particular encouragement: through our partnerships with our funders, through our collaboration with our portfolio social businesses and through teamwork with our remarkable colleagues and team members, we have been able to carry out work which has shown us that we are an organisation that lives up to its mission and remains true to its purpose.
Discover more in our 2020 Annual Report.

For us, COVID-19 has made clearer than ever the importance of social businesses within our societies and economies throughout the world. How many times have we heard about “building back better” or increased focus on “stakeholder capitalism”? Social businesses represent the better, more inclusive capitalism that we all want to see, and businesses great and small throughout the world have a huge amount to learn from them.
Going forward, we at Yunus Social Business will continue to do everything in our power to finance and support these game-changing social businesses and bring more attention to them, as they deserve. At the same time, we will continue to work with corporations and support them in learning best practices from the fantastic social-business entrepreneurs in our portfolio and beyond.

Building a network requires processes, structure and lots of alignment. But in order for the network to truly work, it requires trust and deep-felt human connection around a common purpose. For over 10 years, YSB has built a strong network and every year we are learning more about the effects of communities and networks. This allows us to address social problems in bold new ways.

As an output of the ANDE SGB Finance Learning Lab, ANDE India and Asha Impact have collaborated, with the support of SAP and UNDP SDG Finance Facility, to put together this playbook on Social Success Notes.

We are excited to announce our partnership with IKEA Foundation as part of their expanding focus on social entrepreneurship.