I’m writing this from the launch of Phase 2 of our youth fund (www.ysei.org) in Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia. We’re holding the launch of the YSEI Fellowships 2008 at the GKP Pavilion at the WCIT 2008 Exhibition Area

The Fellowship recognises the potential of young social entrepreneurs in contributing to socio-economic growth and provide sstart-up support for young social entrepreneurs from developing countries to nurture their innovative ideas.

YSEI Asia Fellowship 2008 will provide support for 10 Fellows with a seed funding totalling USD125,000, on-site mentorship, essential development knowledge and tools on social entrepreneurship as well as access to diverse networks.

Twenty candidates have been shortlisted through an online competition for the Fellowships this year. We’ll be posting a full Podcast of the week’s events shortly.

Our other Tandem event being held this week in KL - The Tigers’ Lair: “Social Entrepreneurs Pitch for Scale-up Funding”

Enter the Tigers’ Lair pits 4 entrepreneurs in a high-profiled contest to bid for funding to grow their social enterprises.

The contestants are young social entrepreneurs based in developing countries, who believe that their enterprises are viable and will offer high potential for returns.

Each will have a one-time opportunity to pitch their business plans to the ‘Tigers’ – a panel of 4 successful entrepreneurs and funders.

The winner must pass the Tigers’ probe in order to be considered for funding, business advice, mentorship, and global networking opportunities.

The pitchers are all part of the YSEI fellowship. We have two of our ’superstars’ fromlast year and two new potential stars getting upon stage

Raj Ridvan Singh - International Director & Co-founder of Science of Life System 24/7 (SOLS 24/7)

SOLS 24/7 provides holistic life-skills education and boarding to underprivileged youth especially girls. SOLS 24/7’s mission is to develop as many youth as possible to become skilled, responsible, dynamic, disciplined, compassionate and socially-conscious to provide them with the necessary support to secure job placements or start their own businesses. Part-time students are charged a nominal fee for revenue generation.

Marielle Nadal- Co-Founder, and currently Executive Director of Idea!s Creatives

Idea!s is a youth-led social enterprise based in the Philippines. Idea!s uses the power of creative communications to enhance the outreach, impact and fundraising efforts of organisations with social objectives, thereby allowing them to touch and transform the lives of more people. Revenue comes from regular and reduced rates for private corporations and non-profit organisations, respectively.

Urjana Shrestha - Founder of Fair-Trade Crafts

Fair-trade Crafts from Nepal is a business model that creates employment opportunities and promotes traditional craftmanship talents to global markets. The enterprise aims to provide job opporturnities for some of the country’s most disadvantaged people by promoting their traditional crafts to the international market and providing them with good value of their work, which will in turn help sustain their talents, reduce poverty and advance community development.

Jamil Goheer-Founder of Cultural Classics

Cultural Classics (CC) is a platform that gives voice to artisans and their spectacular creations from rural and backward areas. CC contributes towards economic empowerment of under privileged community of skillful artisans while creating opportunities for them in these economically disadvantaged areas of the world. CC is determined to leverage the lifestyles of the artisans and share their information through their web portal all over the globe. CC exports these handicrafts in bulk to buyers worldwide.

Outsource your web development and SEO projects to the letIThelp Telecentre in the Philippines!. cDOT are the community telecentre program of award winning Philippines web development firm, Syntactics. Located in Cagayan de Oro in the Southern Philippiness, Syntactics offer Software Development, SEO, Internet Marketing and Website Design.

Their team of professional web designers and developers all work training disadvantaged youth from the local community in all aspects of web development and as the young graduates are ready they are offered paid positions within the firms ranks.

Social Responsibility

letIThelp is committed to the development, establishment and sustainability of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) initiatives for youth in the Philippines and through active participation like their telecentre aim to create a growing movement amonsgt similar communities across the Philippines providing young people with little or no hope with opportunities to work in the fast growing outsourcing industry.

letIThelp Have Moved to Our Bigger and Better Telecentre

“We have moved to a bigger and better space! With the growing need for more space in order to train more youth, we have found the perfect area to use for our services. We are now right in the heart of the City!

Since we are right in the middle of the city, it would be easier for students to come for their trainings at any time of the day or evenings. ” Says Stephanie Caragos, founder of cDOT and CEO for Syntactics, Inc. “We are also happy that from a very small beginning, we have been able to grow and provide jobs to some of the most disadvantaged youth in the Southern Philippines. We have been able to train them into becoming skilled and dedicated IT professionals.” Added Jun Kaamiño, the COO for the company.

letIThelp Services

Web Development
Site Maintenance
Blog Customization
Online Applications Development
Dedicated IT personnel provision

Our Social Mission

True to the mission of social enterprises which is “bridging social opportunity into sustainable reality innovatively, effectively and efficiently,” letIThelp.org goes in line with this to help selected and deserving fresh graduates in Mindanao find the right opportunities in their chosen field of profession. There is a balance needed in the IT industry in the Philippines at this point. Initially, there is the increase of IT outsourcing jobs being directed to the country, however, there is a need of a ready pool of trained and experienced IT professionals to continually sustain the industry and manpower needs. On other hand, there is a saturation of fresh IT graduates from poor families and are graduates of vocational schools and colleges who have the passion and commitment to work in these companies yet, due to the poor and inadequate educational system and lack of actual projects and proper industry-based mentoring, majority of these fresh graduates could not get into their desired work and are forced to accept other jobs that are not attuned with their education, wasting their possible talents and skills just because of the lack of confidence in most companies on them due to the fact that they lack the background, references and experience. Therefore, even if they have finished their education, a sustainable income and the chance of growth for the majority of them is still not attainable.

This being the case, letIThelp will select based on their skills, attitude, desire and passion for work, graduates who are in need of the additional training and work. They will then have the opportunity to learn and earn at the same time for their families. These graduates will be trained and mentored by the Syntactics, Inc. team leaders and supervisors to help them learn the right industry standards, workpace and discipline. After their training period, they will then be promoted to higher positions in the organization, hired by Syntactics, Inc. as a commercial developer, dedicated to a client as a dedicated staff or will be given the chance to work in other IT companies to help answer the need of additional well trained manpower thereby helping more companies grow, to earn more and provide more jobs in society.

LetIThelp will focus more on the hiring underprivileged fresh graduates coming from Mindanao and in providing these graduates opportunities and work close to their families so they no longer have to spend for any relocation expenses and they can be closer to their families.

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This is the YSEI Guide for young social entrepreneurs. Right click here and ‘Save Target As’

If you are an entrepreneur, business person, retired, still working or just someone who believes they have knowledge and business skills that would be useful to youth led, social business ventures in developing nations then consider becoming a volunteer YSEI Mentor. YSEI is designed to encourage young leaders to be a catalyst for positive change and to serve as role models in their societies. Please complete the mentor application form here so we can match you up with one of the fellows. We have projects underway in India (3), Bangladesh (2), Philippines (2) and Timor Leste (1). OrphanIT is one of the founding partners of this unique social business initiative. Please help by volunteering to become a mentor here.