BRAVE — Sustaining SME Jobs Through Yemen's Civil War

Launched in 2017 by Yemen's Small and Micro Enterprise Promotion Service (SMEPS), a subsidiary of the Social Fund for Development, BRAVE (Business Resilience Assistance for Value-adding Enterprises) provided technical assistance, matching grants and value-chain support to small and medium enterprises in agribusiness, fisheries, food processing and health sectors during active civil war.
According to a joint announcement by the Islamic Development Bank (IsDB) and the Islamic Corporation for the Development of the Private Sector (ICD), the programme's first phase (2017–2018) "helped support SMEs to sustain more than 15,000 jobs and create around 1,000 additional jobs." In December 2018, IsDB, ICD and SMEPS signed a scale-up combining a $9 million grant from the transition fund with $32.24 million from the Women Entrepreneurs Finance Initiative (We-Fi), explicitly targeting women-owned enterprises for the next phase.
The jobs figures are genuinely quantified — unusual for interventions in a country with almost no functioning statistical infrastructure — but they originate entirely from the implementing consortium's own reporting rather than an independent external evaluation, and should be read as self-reported programme data rather than audited impact evidence. A separate, unrelated SMEPS/UNDP agriculture project has reported different job-growth figures (47 to 112 formal jobs); these should not be confused with BRAVE's own reporting.
Yemen's continuing conflict, currency collapse and access constraints make it impossible to verify whether the reported jobs sustained through 2017–2018 persisted afterward, and no independent audit of BRAVE's outcomes has been published.

Read the full analysis: http://smeps.org.ye/