“We are not job seekers; we are job creators.” — Professor Muhammad Yunus.
Every year on June 28, the global community comes together to remember not only an event but also a growing global philosophy movement of hope, dignity, and innovation. Social Business Day is not only a date on the calendar; it is a powerful reminder that business, when purpose-led rather than profit-led, can heal our most significant wounds—from poverty and inequality to environmental degradation.
This year, the 15th Social Business Day will be observed on June 27–28, 2025, at the Samajik Convention Centre, Zirabo, Savar, Dhaka. The Yunus Centre will host it in partnership with the Grameen Group. On the theme “Social Business is the Most Efficient Path to Ensure Healthcare for All,” the conference aims to explore how socially driven enterprises can transform the landscape of access to healthcare services, especially for underserved and vulnerable groups.
Organized by Nobel Peace Laureate Professor Muhammad Yunus, the inventor of microcredit and founder of Grameen Bank, Social Business Day brings together an unprecedented assembly of thinkers, changemakers, and problem-solvers—entrepreneurs, educators, youth leaders, development professionals, CEOs, and government officials. It is a convergence of ideals and actions.
In a world now embroiled in the twin crises of climate breakdown and systemic inequality—enforced by the ethical complexities offered by artificial Intelligence—Social Business Day 2025 takes on new urgency and profound meaning. It is no longer merely a celebration of achievement; it is a blueprint for the future of human history, where economics works in tandem with ethics and innovation with inclusion.
This year’s celebration will examine how the social business model has developed, impacted, and gazed into the future, emphasizing the way it continues to transform lives even in the most fragile contexts. With a strong emphasis on access to healthcare, the event will highlight game-changing models, cross-industry collaborations, and youth movements that demonstrate how capitalism can be both human and sustainable.
Social Business Day 2025 is a call to action to redefine fundamentally how we construct our economies—not with the purpose of profit, but with the potential of purpose. It invites us to envision business not as a tool of accumulation but as a vehicle for emancipation, empowering the excluded, unleashing entrepreneurial power, and confronting the highest challenges of humanity with dignity and creativity.
This article examines the vision, history, and evolving impact of Social Business Day 2025, as well as its role in shaping a new economic model centered on justice, sustainability, and mutual prosperity.
History of Social Business Day
The proclamation of Social Business Day in 2009 officially institutionalized a groundbreaking concept pioneered by Professor Muhammad Yunus: the “social business.” A standalone business whose profits are reinvested in addressing social problems rather than being distributed to shareholders, it was groundbreaking and challenged mainstream capitalism. Driven by the promise of microcredit and the belief that poverty is a rational human invention, Professor Yunus shared this vision on the pages of his 2007 bestseller Creating a World Without Poverty. From humble origins as a modest movement in Dhaka, Bangladesh, Social Business Day has evolved into a global platform for paradigm-shifting concepts and cross-sectoral synergy.
Key Milestones:
- 2009: Social Business Day is organized for the first time in Dhaka with local business leaders and Grameen partners.
- 2010: Launch of expansion in Latin America and Europe with special forums organized in Germany, Colombia, and Albania.
- 2015: The UN adopts the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and confirms the mission of social business as a global development tool.
- 2020: The COVID-19 pandemic forces the conference online, achieving a record-breaking worldwide reach in over 80 countries.
- 2024: Climate action is the focus of Social Business Day, aligning its program with COP29 as part of climate-resilient social entrepreneurship support.
Over time, the conference has grown to become increasingly a watermark of worldwide commitment to people-oriented capitalism.
Social Business Day 2025: Topics of Special Interest and Areas of Concentration
Theme: “Innovating for Equity: Social Business in the Age of AI and Climate Action”
As the world struggles with two of the most potent forces shaping humanity in the present day—climate change and artificial Intelligence—the Social Business Day 2025 theme raises a timely and pressing question: How can innovation be employed not to widen chasms but to heal them?
At a moment in history when digital technologies are transforming work, learning, and government, and environmental degradation is displacing millions, the social business mission has never been more crucial. The sessions of this year are anchored in Professor Muhammad Yunus’s dream of business as a solution-finder, not a solution-eraser. The theme, “Innovating for Equity,” for 2025 challenges leaders to ensure that the benefits of these transformational forces reach all geographies, genders, and generations equally.
Rather than viewing AI and climate action as issues, the conference frames them as solutions: remaking systems, turning traditional hierarchies on their head, and empowering the world’s most left-out communities through self-reinforcing, scalable business models.
Year-round programming will focus on three interrelated areas of action:
- AI and Digital Inclusion: Closing the Global Tech Gap
Artificial Intelligence can redefine productivity across sectors—health to agriculture—but, in the absence of deliberate equity thinking, can leave billions behind.
Social Business Day 2025 will shine the spotlight on trail-blazing ventures, including:
- AI for Social Good: Technologies to detect early warning signs of outbreaks of disease, reduce maternal mortality rates, and revolutionize remote education for disadvantaged children.
- Inclusive Fintech: Micro-savings apps, mobile money wallets, and credit scoring models for informal workers and smallholder farmers.
- Infrastructure and Digital Literacy: Community initiatives that deliver digital capability to the excluded—rural women and older people—facilitating access to jobs, e-commerce, and civic engagement.
Local collaborators from MIT, Grameen Technology Lab, and East Africa’s local cooperatives will discuss how inclusive design serves as the entry point to technological justice.
- Climate Resilience and Green Social Businesses: Innovating Within Planetary Limits
The climate crisis is not something that is yet to occur—it is already happening. From sea-level rise to starvation, Global South communities are affected disproportionately. Social Business Day 2025 puts climate resilience on the agenda as a key part of social enterprise planning.
“Examples highlighted include:
- Decentralized Renewable Energy: Solar micro-grids and wind farms powering rural schools and clinics in Sierra Leone and northern Bangladesh.”.
- Circular Economy Startups: Women entrepreneurial ventures that convert fashion clothing textile waste to designer wear or city trash to biogas for slum populations.
- Agroecological Innovation: Climate-resilient seed banks, vertical farming in megacities, and AI-based soil health monitoring for regenerative agriculture.
These innovations are in sync with the international climate finance architecture and reflective of local genius in the age of planetary crisis.
- Gender Equality and Youth Entrepreneurship: Investment in the Changemakers of Tomorrow
Empowering formerly excluded groups with capital, opportunity, and voice is the essence of the social business model.
On the agenda in 2025 will be:
- Women’s Enterprise Networks: Collaboratives that offer mentorship, microfinance, and peer support for women entrepreneurs launching businesses in conflict or conservative areas.
- Youth Startup Ecosystems: Regional innovation centers that offer seed financing and technical mentorship to young founders under the age of 30 tackling community-specific challenges.
- University-industry partnerships: Projects that bridge research in the academy and application in practice, where innovation is informed by intellectual acuity and practical utility.
The conference will also witness the launch of Yunus Centre’s “Global GenZ Challenge,” a new initiative to identify and amplify social business initiatives undertaken by students from 50 nations.
Why It Matters
The strength of these themes lies in their overlap. Today’s challenges are not siloed—neither are the answers. AI won’t end poverty if it only reinscribes data bias. Climate adaptation is for naughty if it doesn’t account for gender dynamics. Holistic, community-based solutions are where the real impact lies. Social Business Day 2025 is an international hub of this thinking—merging economics and ethics, innovation and empathy. As Professor Yunus has put it: “The only way to solve massive problems is by changing the way we think about business itself.”
While the delegates are prepared to face the challenges of this year, there is one thing we can be certain of: the future belongs to those who can innovate with ethics and act courageously. Social Business Day is not a party only—it is creating the world we wish to inhabit.
Bridging Thought and Action: Academia Dialogue and the 3ZERO Club Convention
As part of its glorious heritage, Social Business Day 2025 will also host two cornerstone events that anchor the movement in both academic scholarship and grassroots activism:
The Academia Dialogue and the 3ZERO Club Convention on June 29.
The Academia Dialogue: Taking Social Business Forward in Higher Education
Organized in collaboration with North South University, Bangladesh’s premier private university for tertiary education, the Academia Dialogue is a unique intellectual platform. It brings together teachers, students, and scholars from around the globe to discuss how social business is reshaping the landscape of academic thought and pedagogy.
In a time when mainstream business education is challenged to react with ethical stewardship and inclusive innovation, this forum asks pressing questions:
- How are universities integrating social businesses more closely into business, economics, and development studies curricula?
- What research trends are newly emerging that demonstrate the effectiveness of social business in addressing poverty, disparity, and climate change problems?
- How can students translate classroom learning to real-world impact through social entrepreneurship?
Participants will present joint case studies, curriculum models, joint research projects, and jointly authored papers. North South University’s Social Business Centre, a model of institutionalizing Yunus’ philosophy, will also share its experience in student incubation programs and working with rural entrepreneurs.
The 3ZERO Club Convention: Creating a Global Youth-Led Movement
Immediately following the Academia Dialogue, the 3ZERO Club Convention will bring together a global and committed network of young leaders, i.e., 3ZERO Club Members, as well as their support persons (3Z Support Persons) and support organizations (3Z Support Organizations) from across continents. Their mission is ambitious but urgent: to establish a world of
- Zero Net Carbon Emissions,
- Zero Wealth Concentration, and
- Zero Unemployment,
by empowering young leaders to be change agents in their communities.
This year’s convention will feature:
- Interactive sessions for spearheading climate innovation in one’s environment.
- Peer workshops for inclusive finance, micro-entrepreneurship, and digital advocacy.
- Cross-cultural networking forums for encouraging collaboration between clubs from various parts of Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas.
3ZERO philosophy stems from Professor Yunus’s belief that young people are not problems to be solved but solutions to be unleashed. In the words of Dr. Yunus, “Unemployment exists because we tell young people to find jobs instead of creating them.” The 3ZERO movement flips this narrative around—reversing campuses and communities into social innovation incubators.
Coupled, the Academia Dialogue and the 3ZERO Club Convention are the driving forces within the social business system. While the former strengthens intellectual roots, the latter pushes action on the ground. Both are instrumental in transforming Social Business Day from an annual event to a sustained, global movement for systems change.
Conclusion: Building the Future Through Purpose
Social Business Day 2025 is not a celebration in itself but a clarion call to a new civilization with not greed but compassion at its helm. When the world is troubled by rising inequality, war, climate breakdown, and spiritual disillusionment, this conclave is a call as bold as a trumpet. Another world can be created where business serves humanity, not its master.
At its heart is Professor Muhammad Yunus’s abiding vision: “Business exists to solve problems, not create them.” His ethic—that business can and must be a force for good—has crossed borders, inspired generations, and ignited a quiet revolution in boardrooms, classrooms, and communities everywhere.
Social businesses, sustained by compassion and driven by entrepreneurship, are proving we can address poverty, joblessness, and environmental degradation—not with generosity, but with dignity. They are more than an economic innovation; they are a moral necessity.
As one of this year’s keynote speakers will proclaim: “The future is not inherited—it is co-created. And social business is the blueprint.”
Social Business Day 2025 is a call—to governments to legislate with justice, to corporations to act with conscience, to educators to teach with vision, and to young people everywhere to lead with courage. It is a reminder that hope is not a luxury but an obligation—and that each action of purpose-driven enterprise leads us closer to a world that works for all.
Let us answer this call—not tomorrow, but today. As Professor Yunus so eloquently reminds us:
“A world of three zeros—zero poverty, zero Unemployment, and zero net carbon emissions—is not a utopia. It is a destination. And together,