Islamic Corporation for the Development of the Private Sector

JEDDAH, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, December 30, 2018/ — IDB Head Office witnessed today the signing ceremony of the implementation agreements for the scale up of BRAVE Program in Yemen. The Business Resilience Assistance for Value-adding Enterprises (BRAVE) aims to enhance the resilience of the SMEs in Yemen in vital sectors against the impacts of the ongoing conflict. The positive results of the first phase (2017-2018) included sustaining existing jobs, creating news ones and restoring trust links across supported the value chains and financial sector. This progress encouraged the development partners ISDB, ICD ( www.ICD-ps.org) and SMEPS to lunch the second phase of BRAVE.

Dr. Mansur Muhtar, Vice President Sector Operations commended the progress made in BRAVE project providing livelihood support to Yemen by unleashing private sector role in maintaining business resilience. Dr. Mansur Also highlighted the unique partnership model between the international donors, IsDB Group and the leading developmental and financial institutions of Yemen. Having raised USD 9 million of grants from the transition fund and another USD 32.24 million of grants from the Women Entrepreneurs Financing Initiative (We-FI), the BRAVE model is in line with the P5P program of changing IsDB Group into bank of developers for development.

Mr. Ayman Sejiny, the CEO of ICD, said that ICD is honored to lead the IsDB Group efforts in business resilience support in fragile contexts. He further stated that “ICD will expand its support to this innovative program providing technical oversight and resource mobilization for SMEPS and our partner banks in Yemen. We are also working with our partners to adapt and adopt the BRAVE model to other comparable contexts where SMEs are in need for business resilience support to cope with business environment challenges. These interventions are also leveraging the established network partner banks of ICD in our member countries”.

Mr. Wesam Qaid, Executive Director of Small Mediun Enterprise Promotion Services (SMEPS), expressed his appreciation of how the partnership with IsDB and ICD is evolving rapidly while accelerating SMEPS development impact in the SME sector in Yemen. According to Mr. Wesam: “ the project has helped support SMEs to sustain more than 15000 jobs and create around 1000 additional direct jobs in the vital sectors of Health, Agribusiness, Food processing and Fisheries as a result of immediate improvement in firms’ performance. More impact is expected in the upcoming scaling of the project across gender and value chain dimensions under the new wave of funding facilitated from IsDB Group.