Teach A Man To Fish equips young people worldwide with entrepreneurial skills and mindsets through hands-on education programs that prepare them to thrive in work and life. Operating globally since 2006, they’ve supported over 500,000 youth and engaged more than 10,000 schools through two core programs: School Enterprise Challenge, where students plan and run real businesses at school, and Enterprise Adventure, a gamified learning journey for individual young people to launch their own ventures.
Their approach addresses a critical gap in education – 289 million young people globally are not in employment, education, or training. By providing practical entrepreneurship education before young people leave school, Teach A Man To Fish helps them develop problem-solving, teamwork, leadership, and communication skills that translate directly into employment readiness and business creation.
Social Capital Foundation has partnered with Teach A Man To Fish for twelve years, playing an important role in developing and scaling their programs to reach marginalized communities globally.
Our collaboration began in Honduras, supporting intensive business development at the Dr. Stephen Youngberg Technical Vocational School, which achieved 90% self-sustainability through student-run enterprises. This demonstrated the power of school businesses but revealed the need for a more scalable approach.
From 2015 onwards, we supported the development and expansion of School Enterprise Challenge across Central America, Uganda, South Africa, and Rwanda. The Rwanda project alone reached 7,500 young people across 86 schools in one year, with 89% showing significant increases in life and business skills.
When Covid-19 disrupted education globally, we supported Teach A Man To Fish to develop Enterprise Adventure – a program enabling young people to learn entrepreneurship independently outside school settings. Starting with home learning workbooks for 3,700 children and youth, the program evolved to include a complete business development structure and eventually a digital version. This expansion allowed young people excluded from School Enterprise Challenge to independently move from their vision to a functioning business, reaching beyond traditional school-based delivery.
Current support (2025-2027)
We’re now supporting Teach A Man To Fish to refine and validate a sustainable business model that will enable them to scale impact while reducing reliance on philanthropic funding. Over three years, the program aims to reach 300,000 young people while generating $300,000 in earned income through fee-based services. The initiative focuses on three areas: developing their technology platform to support customized offerings for medium-to-high fee schools in India and Nigeria, building strategic partnerships where licensing and training fees enable broader reach, and attracting $1 million in catalytic capital by year three to support the path toward reaching one million young people by 2030. This approach maintains their mission focus – 90% of participants will continue to be low-income youth in developing countries – while creating the financial sustainability needed for long-term impact at scale.
