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Good practice Imported

BRAVE — Sustaining SME Jobs Through Yemen's Civil War

Yemen · Sana'a · See the Yemen profile · See the Sana'a profile

Evidence: Descriptive / self-reported Top 89% 48/100 · Ask Evidence Copilot about this practice

Yemen's SMEPS ran a multi-donor SME-support programme through the civil war, sustaining an estimated 15,000 jobs and creating 1,000 more in agribusiness, fisheries and food processing, before a 2018 scale-up added $41 million in grants and blended finance.

15,000+ jobs
Jobs sustained (2017-2018)
~1,000 jobs
Jobs created (2017-2018)
9 million USD
2018 scale-up grant (transition fund)
32.24 million USD
2018 scale-up financing (We-Fi)

Details

Maturity
Scaling
Promoter
SMEPS (Social Fund for Development), with Islamic Development Bank and ICD
Period
2017–present
Keywords
SME resilience, agribusiness, fisheries, food processing, conflict economy

Context

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.

Objectives

The programme aimed to sustain and create SME jobs in Yemen's productive sectors despite the ongoing conflict.

Activities

BRAVE delivered technical assistance, matching grants and value-chain support to SMEs, and in December 2018 the Islamic Development Bank (IsDB), the Islamic Corporation for the Development of the Private Sector (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.

Results

According to a joint IsDB/ICD announcement, the programme's first phase (2017-2018) "helped support SMEs to sustain more than 15,000 jobs and create around 1,000 additional jobs."

Conclusions

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 Yemen's continuing conflict, currency collapse and access constraints make it impossible to verify whether the reported jobs sustained through 2017-2018 persisted afterward.

Implementation
Indicative cost
High (€500k–€5M) — First phase (2017-2018) funded jobs support; the December 2018 scale-up combined a $9 million transition-fund grant with $32.24 million in We-Fi blended finance, roughly $41 million in total.
Time to results
Medium (1–3 years) — Phase 1 ran 2017-2018; the scale-up was signed in December 2018, with outcomes only verified through that period given wartime access constraints.
Staffing & skills
Small and Micro Enterprise Promotion Service (SMEPS), a subsidiary of Yemen's Social Fund for Development, Islamic Development Bank (IsDB), Islamic Corporation for the Development of the Private Sector (ICD), Women Entrepreneurs Finance Initiative (We-Fi), joining from the 2018 scale-up

Conditions for success

  • Combining technical assistance, matching grants and value-chain support rather than grants alone
  • Targeting productive sectors (agribusiness, fisheries, food processing, health) with export or food-security relevance
  • Explicit gender targeting in the 2018 scale-up via We-Fi financing

Common failure modes

  • Jobs figures come entirely from the implementing consortium's own reporting, with no independent audit found
  • Yemen's continuing conflict, currency collapse and access constraints make it impossible to verify whether reported jobs persisted after 2018
  • A separate, unrelated SMEPS/UNDP agriculture project reported different job-growth figures (47 to 112 jobs), risking confusion with BRAVE's own figures

Where it fits

Governance type
national implementer (SMEPS) plus multilateral development finance institutions
Scale
national, operating during active civil war
Income level
low-income, conflict-affected

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Data sources

Where this practice's information was retrieved from, and when.

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