The Islamic Development Bank, ICD and SMEPT held a signing ceremony of the implementation agreements for the scale up of BRAVE Program in Yemen.

The Business Resilience Assistance for Value-adding Enterprises (BRAVE) plan aims to enhance the resilience of the SMEs in Yemen in vital sectors against the impacts of the ongoing conflict, according to a statement from the IsDB. The ceremony was held at the IDB Head Office.

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 and SMEPS to launch 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 $9 million of grants from the transition fund and another $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.

“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," said Ayman Sejiny, the CEO of ICD.

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.

“The project has helped support SMEs to sustain more than 15,000 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," said Qaid.

AFP.