The Virtual Market Place : Connecting Women-Owned Small and Medium Sized Enterprises to E-Commerce Platforms in Middle East and North Africa Region

This Brief is part of the Solutions for Youth Employment (S4YE) Knowledge Brief series focusing on the design and implementation of youth employment programs. This Brief builds on S4YE’s 2018 annual report, Digital Jobs for Youth: Young Women in the Digital Economy, which highlighted new and emerging strategies for practitioners designing digital jobs interventions for youth. In this Knowledge Brief, authors examine how the World Bank’s ‘E-Commerce for Women-Led SMEs’ project addresses the constraints faced by small, and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) run or managed by women operating in: Algeria; Djibouti; the Arab Republic of Egypt; Jordan; Lebanon; Morocco; and Tunisia. The authors specifically highlight how the World Bank seeks to support women-led SMEs (WSMEs) in the Middle East North Africa region (MENA) in accessing global markets through e-commerce platforms, and the strategies used to help WSMEs to access financial resources, develop capacity, and increase sales. Driving the jobs agenda of the World Bank, the Jobs Group has developed a paradigm that focuses not only on creating more jobs, but also on creating better and more inclusive jobs. The authors showcase the ‘E-Commerce for Women-Led SMEs’ project to illustrate how projects can achieve key jobs outcomes by helping young, female entrepreneurs to increase their income and productivity. The MENA e-commerce Project is part of the World Bank Group’s Women Entrepreneurs Finance Initiative (We-Fi), a joint global initiative of the World Bank and International Finance Corporation that tests innovations and scales up successful pilots under three thematic pillars, strengthening entrepreneurial ecosystems, expanding financial services, and improving market access, and includes research, investment, advice, partnerships and peer-learning efforts. The program aims to reach 43,000 women entrepreneurs and catalyze 40,000 loans to WSMEs.