Microfinance for Youth Entrepreneurship Campaign 2024

The Microfinance Centre (MFC) is committed to ensuring equal opportunities for young people to start their own businesses and is launching the Microfinance for Youth Entrepreneurship Campaign 2024. Together with its partners, MFC aims to spotlight the essential role of the microfinance sector in empowering young entrepreneurs. This campaign will share key insights from the recent publication Missing Entrepreneurs 2023 and highlight success stories from various microfinance institutions across Europe.

Through this initiative, MFC will expand its reach to engage microfinance stakeholders and underscore the sector’s critical role in supporting youth entrepreneurship. According to Missing Entrepreneurs 2023, around 40% of young people in the EU, aged 15 to 30, aspire to be self-employed. However, barriers such as limited entrepreneurial skills, constrained networking opportunities, and restricted access to finance continue to hinder young people’s ability to start businesses or become self-employed, despite increased support.

Ewa Bankowska, MFC Deputy Director, stated: The Microfinance Centre and its partners have supported the ‘missing entrepreneurs’ for over 2 years. By sharing success stories and building awareness, we advocate for microfinance as a vital bridge for young entrepreneurs facing financial barriers. Last year’s campaign highlighted the role of microfinance in supporting female entrepreneurship and this year, we’re focusing on youth. Notably, 89% of European MFIs already finance young entrepreneurs’ ventures. Our mission is to boost young entrepreneurship internationally through microfinancing.

The Missing Entrepreneurs 2023 is the seventh edition in a series of biennial reports examining how government policies can release untapped entrepreneurial potential from under-represented parts of the population of impactful entrepreneurs, including women, youth, seniors, the unemployed, immigrants and people with disabilities.

Participating organizations include:

  • 3Bank
  • Prima Finantare
  • Microinvest
  • Vitas30
  • Partner
  • Fondi Besa
  • Microsmart
  • Mi-Bospo
  • AMFI
  • FedInvest
  • EKI
  • NOA
  • BCR Social Finance IFN
  • Moznosti
  • Agro and Social Fund
  • AMA
  • Kredo

Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Commission. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them. 

The Missing Entrepreneurs 2023 is the seventh edition in a series of biennial reports examining how government policies can release untapped entrepreneurial potential from under-represented parts of the population of impactful entrepreneurs, including women, youth, seniors, the unemployed, immigrants and people with disabilities. It offers comparative data on the entrepreneurship activities and the barriers faced by each group across OECD and European Union countries. It takes a deep dive into the effectiveness of youth entrepreneurship schemes and the design of welfare bridge schemes for business creation by job seekers. It also contains country profiles for each of the 27 EU Member States showing the major recent trends in diversity in entrepreneurship and the current state and evolution of policy for each country.