Street Business School

Street Business School (SBS) trains women to launch micro-businesses, gain confidence and leave poverty behind. Through a social franchise model, we train other nonprofits to add SBS to their toolkits and deliver global entrepreneurship training to the people they serve. By 2030, SBS will have trained partners to empower 1 million women to lift their families from poverty.

SBS works with women living in deep poverty in 25 countries around the globe. These “coaches” often experience numerous and interconnected barriers to improving their financial situation, including: a lack of formal education; limited access to formal sector employment opportunities; lack of access to sanitation, hygiene, and health services; malnutrition; illness; and endemic cultural gender inequality.

SBS’s model is proven to equip women to lift themselves and their families out of poverty. Results from a randomized control trial by researchers from the University of California, Berkeley over the period from August 2018 to December 2021 demonstrated robust results on earnings and business ownership for women trained by SBS in five communities in Uganda:

• SBS graduates’ profits one year after graduation were 119% higher than those in the control group.
• SBS graduates increased earnings from an average of $2.47/day at baseline, to $4.82/day one year after graduating.
• At baseline, only 52% of women who enrolled in SBS owned a business. This increased to 73% at graduation and remained at that level a year after graduation.

SBS has scaled through a social franchise model, in which we certify other NGOs to customize and implement SBS programming in their communities, reaching women across the globe in their local language through trusted community partners. As of January 2022, SBS is being delivered to women in 25 countries in partnership with 155 NGO Partners, who collectively address 16 of the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals. The SBS network has collectively trained over 18,000 women, lifting over 100,000 people out of poverty.

Join us in our goal of lifting 1 million women and their families from poverty!