Summit Overview

In July 2014 the city of Sydney hosted the fifth annual G20 Young Entrepreneurs’ Alliance Summit, the flagship gathering of a movement that began in 2010 to put youth entrepreneurship at the centre of the world’s economic agenda. For five days, founders, investors, policy makers, academics and the leaders of national entrepreneurship organisations met under one roof to agree on practical ways to help young businesses grow and to carry that message to the economies that matter most.

A movement built by twenty economies

The G20 Young Entrepreneurs’ Alliance, usually shortened to G20 YEA, is a collective of leading entrepreneurship support organisations representing the G20 countries. Its members promote youth entrepreneurship as a powerful driver of economic renewal, job creation, innovation and social change. Country members include Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Russia, the Republic of Korea, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, the United Kingdom, the United States, South Africa and Argentina, with the European Union also represented in the Alliance.

What began as a shared idea between a handful of organisations grew into a network representing more than a million young entrepreneurs who between them employ over twelve million people, and a wider community of roughly eleven million entrepreneurs across the Alliance’s extended networks. The annual Summit is the point at which that network meets face to face.

The challenge the Summit was created to answer

The Alliance was founded because most economies were struggling to create enough employment for their young populations. Developed economies found themselves caught between rising deficits, low rates of growth and levels of unemployment that fell disproportionately on young people. At the time there were some 1.8 billion young people in the world, around ninety per cent of them living in developing countries, and roughly two thirds of those were underemployed. International Labour Organization statistics pointed to around seventy-three million young people unemployed, with youth unemployment above fifty per cent in many countries.

The Alliance’s answer was simple and ambitious: a global problem needs a global solution. By organising young entrepreneurs themselves, the G20 YEA set out to promote entrepreneurship as a practical route to economic renewal and to make sure the voice of job creators was heard in the rooms where policy is written.

The fifth Summit, Sydney 2014

The 2014 Summit ran from 18 to 22 July 2014, deliberately placed alongside Australia’s presidency of the G20. More than four hundred young entrepreneurs, leaders and change makers took part, making it the largest gathering in the Alliance’s history to that point. The programme combined plenary sessions, closed leadership meetings, ecosystem showcases, social functions and structured networking, all built around the belief that entrepreneurial thinking can change the world.

Delegates were hosted at the Sheraton on the Park in central Sydney, the Summit venue and the official delegate village for the week. Sessions used the hotel’s Grand Ballroom and adjoining rooms, with registration, networking and the leadership assembly spread across the hotel and nearby spaces.

Six pillars of an entrepreneurial ecosystem

Delegates worked across six pillars that the Alliance identified as the building blocks of a cohesive entrepreneurial ecosystem. Every working session, showcase and recommendation was organised around them:

• Access to capital
• Education and coordinated support
• Government regulation
• Globalisation and trade
• Entrepreneurship culture
• Innovation and technology

Together the six pillars gave the Summit a common language for comparing the very different conditions that young founders face from one economy to the next, and for shaping recommendations that could travel across borders.

An action plan on youth employment

The central deliverable of the week was a global action plan on youth employment, agreed by the stakeholders present and designed to be delivered through specific actions in every participating country. Its stated ambition was to help reduce global youth unemployment below ten per cent by 2030. The table below sets out the Summit at a glance.

From Sydney to the G20 table

The Summit closed with G20 YEA leaders from nineteen countries and the European Union signing the 2014 G20 YEA Communique, a short but landmark document that set out the Alliance’s shared position. Delegates called on G20 leaders, finance ministers and central bank governors to focus on entrepreneurship and to agree policies, legislation and incentives for ecosystems that support start-ups and sustainable high-growth small and medium enterprises.

Those recommendations were carried directly into the B20 and G20 Leaders’ Summits that followed, and Alliance members committed to actioning them in their own countries through national programmes and advocacy.

What came next

The 2014 Summit was the fifth in a series that continues to grow. As Australia passed the G20 chair to Turkey for 2015, the Alliance looked ahead to the next host and to the work of turning the Sydney action plan into measurable change in every member economy. These Summit Overview pages gather the purpose, the people and the outcome of that week in July 2014.