How It Started: A Foreword, a Video Call and Two Weeks in Punjab

In 2016, Thomas Jakel read a foreword by Bill Drayton, the founder of Ashoka, about a social entrepreneur in Pakistan: Ali Raza Khan, who gave young people from poor backgrounds a little capital, trusted them to start ventures, and watched most of them succeed. Thomas wrote to Ali and asked for an interview. After an hour-long video call he asked whether he could come and see the work himself. Early in 2017 he spent almost two weeks with Ali at universities and vocational institutes in Punjab, talking to hundreds of students and dozens of teachers. YES Founders Foundation grew out of that visit.

In July 2023, Thomas recorded a short video about Ali, the model, and why the foundation exists.

The pilot in Pakistan

The story Thomas retells comes from Bill Drayton’s HuffPost column: Ali challenged thousands of students at vocational schools to create their own ventures within a month. The documented figures are in the book Ali and Thomas wrote together, Yes! Youth-Led Changemaking (2017): 5,950 young people at 79 vocational institutes, organised in 1,190 teams. 926 teams (78 percent) made a profit and another 130 broke even. Carina Wong, then at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, summed it up in Stanford Social Innovation Review as “an 80 percent success rate”.

Beyond Pakistan

• Zimbabwe. Thomas shared the model with a colleague who piloted it there. It has since grown into the Chitungwiza Hub, run by The Work Under The Tree Trust: 155 teams since 2023, 77 percent of them profitable and 95 percent repaying their trust-based investment. The earlier rounds are in Zimbabwe over time.
• Kenya and Mexico. Small pilots: challenges with young people in Kenya and a primary school in Mexico, where children baked bread and sold crafts. We have no complete data from these pilots, so we report no figures for them.

The facilitator program

The end of the video introduces a program that trains people to run these challenges themselves, with mentoring and a year of support, and with Ali involved. It is now taking applications for its first cohort on changemaking.org.

If you run a school, college or university and want to see what this looks like on your campus, book a discovery call.