JET — Burundi's $100 Million World Bank Programme to Formalise and Finance MSMEs

Burundi is one of the world's least financially developed economies, where access to credit for micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) has long been constrained by thin bank capital and high collateral requirements.

The Jobs and Economic Transformation (JET) project, approved by the World Bank's International Development Association on 1 December 2023 with a $100 million grant, aims to expand MSME access to finance and support business-climate reform.

JET works by recapitalising and de-risking partner financial institutions, expanding digital financial services to cut the cost of MSME lending, and funding productive infrastructure and technological equipment for a core group of higher-growth firms, alongside a parallel track of business-climate reforms targeting bottlenecks identified in the IFC's Country Private Sector Diagnostic for Burundi.

The project's official results framework targets 4,228 direct jobs and 113,000 indirect jobs, and a 15% increase in existing informal private-sector employment, with explicit design priority for enterprises owned by women and refugees.

As an approved but still-early grant programme, JET's job-creation figures are ex-ante targets rather than audited outcomes; Burundi's chronic macro-fiscal fragility and the World Bank's own diagnostic work flag continuing constraints — thin financial-sector depth and weak firm-level productivity — that will determine whether the targets are met.