World Bank Global Partnership for Youth Investment and Silatech accelerate strategic collaboration to support youth employment, enterprise development

The Global Public-Private Partnership for Youth Investment, co-founded by the World Bank Group and the ImagineNations Group, seeks to test new approaches, catalyze, incubate, and support the development and implementation of cutting edge and innovative interventions to expand the set of economic opportunities available to young people.

"We will offer financial products and business development service support to encourage financial intermediaries to invest in what we believe is a high-growth niche youth micro enterprise market across the region," said Patil at the Doha Summit co-hosted by Silatech and the Financial Times.

Emerging evidence from the Global Partnership's action oriented research agenda in youth microfinance confirms that financial intermediaries are discriminating against youth led micro, small and medium sized enterprises purely based on the young age of the owner-operator.

"Better understanding this bias through solid research such as randomized experiments and correcting for it could support financial access to what is estimated as 300 million eligible, but largely excluded young entrepreneurs across the planet" said Patil.

Rick Little, Chief Executive Officer and Member of the Board Executive Committee of Silatech, said, "as a founding partner of Silatech, the World Bank's Global Partnership for Youth Investment will play a catalytic role with Silatech in broadening and deepening country driven engagement in support of youth employment, enterprise development and investment based on global best practices."

Alan H. Fleischmann, Managing Director of ImagineNations Group, said, "Bringing together the World Bank Global Partnership with Silatech allows for a robust opportunity to leverage and scale-up effective on-the-ground initiatives and would reach more enterprises and entrepreneurs if only these young people had the access to capital and business coaching to help drive their growth and increase their impact in the marketplace."

The Global Partnership will also assist Silatech to reach across the World Bank Group (the Bank, IFC, MIGA) to support youth investment across the Arab World and participate in country-level missions and strategy development that could lead to co-financed and scaled projects and knowledge products based on global best practices.