Yunus Funds grows local social businesses that provide employment, education, healthcare, clean water and clean energy to over 17 million people in East Africa, Latin America & India. We turn donations into investments in social businesses, which we reinvest over and over again, multiplying the impact each time.
Our long-term, patient loans and hands-on growth support are delivered by our teams of local professionals, partnering with social businesses to help them flourish. We have offices in Sao Paulo, Bogota, Mumbai, Bangalore, Kampala, Nairobi and Berlin.
Yunus Corporate guides multinationals (such as Danone, Veolia, McCain, MAN and Tata) to help them transform their purpose. Harnessing our years of experience with social businesses and corporations, we connect the two. With our method, corporations can apply their core competencies to some of the greatest human challenges.
These activities operate under the entity Yunus Social Business GmbH (ltd. company) separate from the charitable entity (gGmbH). Set up as a social business, 100% of Yunus Corporate Innovation’s profits are reinvested to continue to generate and scale our social impact.
In 1983, Prof. Muhammad Yunus created the Grameen Bank, beginning a microfinance revolution which in 2006 earned him one of humanity’s most prestigious awards, the Nobel Peace Prize.
Grameen grew from a microcredit bank into a group of enterprises created with the specific intention of solving human problems. These embodied the first cases of a new, emerging model: social business.
Yunus Social Business was founded in Germany in 2011 by Prof. Muhammad Yunus, Saskia Bruysten and Sophie Eisemann to expand on the success of social business from Bangladesh and ignite it around the world.
Around the same time, corporations began to come to us, excited by the value of social business. We began working with corporations that were inspired to integrate social business into their business model - creating the first corporate social businesses.