Hapide is an awareness-raising and support program for early-stage business initiatives, established in 2014 by YSB Balkans in partnership with UNDP Albania.
It aims to equip young people and new entrepreneurs with the knowledge and skills needed to design and successfully meet the challenges of setting up and growing their business.
To achieve its goal, it organizes, conducts, and facilitates awareness campaigns, training, workshops, meet-ups, and various other events across the region to create awareness for the potential of entrepreneurship, educate aspiring entrepreneurs on basic business principles and inspire them to start entrepreneurship/business initiatives.
It also provides a range of technical assistance and startup/business development services, helping entrepreneurs transform their initial business ideas into concrete, viable, and investable business models, through training, coaching, mentoring, prototyping, market testing, and building feasible go-to-market strategies.
These activities are tailored to the needs of specific communities/groups of potential entrepreneurs, targeting especially youth and women, aiming to inspire and give them practical advice and basic skills to design realistic business ideas.
Since its establishment in early 2014, Hapide has implemented 12 rounds of incubation programs targeting mainly youth and women entrepreneurs in Albania, with a special focus on remote regions of the country. During June – October 2020, it implemented the “Rise up stronger” accelerator program for young and women entrepreneurs whose micro and small businesses were affected by the November 2019 earthquake and/or the Covid-19 pandemic situation. The main results of Hapide during these years include:
- 450+ teams supported by incubation and various services for setting up and developing businesses;
- 80+ startups supported by facilitating access to finance for testing, setting up, and/or business development;
- 500+ business-created jobs created with the support of our incubation and acceleration programs;
In addition, Hapide supports the creation of an enabling entrepreneurship ecosystem in the country, including support to strengthen the youth entrepreneurship communities and networks; strengthening of local mentors' networks; promotion of local entrepreneurship role models and promotion and facilitation of networking/linkages and partnership building with local, regional and European startup actors.
Hapide has established strong partnerships with a wide range of national and regional startup ecosystem players and international actors during these years. Besides YSB Balkans, it has developed a very close collaboration with UNDP Albania, EU for innovation, Business Magazine Albania, Duapune, Garazh community, PfD Foundation, Baker Tilly, Tonucci & Partners, Impact Hub Vienna, Municipality of Tirana, etc.
In the upcoming years, it plans to strengthen even more its activities towards fostering inspiration, awareness, and education of youth about entrepreneurial initiatives and spreading information and ideas about innovative approaches and initiatives with the potential to create a positive impact on the social and economic development of youth the country.