EBRD Women in Business: WB
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The EBRD has developed a proposal for a regional program for the Western Balkans in support of Women in Business (WiB). There will be a creditline from EBRD amounting to 30 million EUR and a grant component of EUR 7.6 million for training and capacity development etc. In January 2014, the EBRD asked Sida for a contribution amounting to 3.5 million EUR. Distri...
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More about the contribution
The EBRD has developed a proposal for a regional program for the Western Balkans in support of Women in Business (WiB). There will be a creditline from EBRD amounting to 30 million EUR and a grant component of EUR 7.6 million for training and capacity development etc. In January 2014, the EBRD asked Sida for a contribution amounting to 3.5 million EUR. Distribution: No country allocations in advance. According to Sida's assessment, the project proposal is relevant in relation to the new regional strategy for the Western Balkans. It also represents a complement to an existing Sida-supported project (Women Entrepreneurship with RCC as coordinator), which focuses on the same issues, but mainly aims at changing policies, guidelines and attitudes of decision makers. The EBRD project is aimed directly at women entrepreneurs (training, mentoring, coaching ) and at 7-10 local banks in order to facilitate the granting of credit to women, who own and operate businesses. It is expected that a similar WiB project for countries of the Eastern Partnership will also be implemented by EBRD with Swedish support.
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Total aid 73,000,000 SEK distributed on 0 activities
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Result
In 2014, Sida extended a grant contribution of SEK 33 million to the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) towards the Women in Business (WiB) programme in the six Western Balkans (WB) countries of Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia and Serbia. In 2018, Sida committed an additional amount of SEK 40 million to support a second phase of the programme covering the period January 2019 to December 2023 across the six Western Balkan countries. The second phase of the programme sought to enhance competition and to stimulate the growth of women-led businesses and their ability to reach their economic potential and make contributions to employment, growth and social inclusion. An impact evaluation of the programme covering 2014-2021 was carried out by external consultants during 2022 and focused on interventions in Armenia, Georgia, Serbia and Kosovo. It found that the WiB programme effectively supported Partner Financial Institutions (PFIs) with technical assistance and credit support, leading to increased lending to women entrepreneurs. However, strict loan conditions and cautious lending practices limited the programme's reach. While First Loss Risk Cover (FLRC) was introduced to encourage PFIs, its utilization remained low. The programme's advisory services helped women entrepreneurs improve their operational processes, increase turnover, and create jobs. However, the impact could potentially have been bigger if outreach was broader and if each business had received all programme components. Nevertheless the evaluation noted that overall, the programme contributed to increased capacity and growth of supported women-led enterprises, as well as PFIs' awareness of the value of investing in women. The sustainability of these impacts varied among PFIs, with some planning to continue offering dedicated credit lines to women, while others did not. Challenges in monitoring and inconsistent qualitative data limited the assessment of the programme's transformative potential and long-term outcomes. The evaluation concluded that while the programme had positive output-level results, its transformative potential and sustainability were less clear. The EBRD monitoring system provided extensive data, but the varying quality of indicators and inconsistent higher-level data prevented a full understanding of the programme's impacts. Sida's contribution to the programme ended with the second phase, that is in December 2023. The results reported at the end of this second phase showed that the programme had contributed to improved access to finance and business support for women-led enterprises and to fostering women's entrepreneurship and economic empowerment. In many cases the reported results for financial support, capacity building, and outreach exceeded the targets. Some examples are given below: i) Increased Financial Support: EBRD extended €41 million to 10 Partner Financial Institutions (PFIs) for on-lending to women-led MSMEs, exceeding the initial target of €40 million. PFIs in turn issued 3,972 sub loans to women-led MSMEs, surpassing the target of 2,500 by 59%; ii) Enhanced Technical Cooperation: All targets for technical cooperation with PFIs were surpassed. iii) Improved Loan Conditions: PFIs have introduced more favorable loan conditions for women-led businesses, such as removing personal guarantee requirements, offering longer loan maturities, and lowering interest rates.
The overall objective of the Women in Business (WiB) programme is to promote women's entrepreneurship and more broadly women's participation in business, by supporting women-led SMEs to access finance, know-how and non-financial business development services. The programme seeks to demonstrate that, when market failures are addressed, obstacles are removed, and women-led SMEs are given equal opportunities. They can then contribute to growth, job creation, and social progress for a free, market-oriented, and democratic society. During the second phase (2019-2023), the programme aims at: 1. Increasing access to finance for women-led small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs), including for first time/start-up borrowers and borrowers based outside of main urban centers. 2. Contributing to a diversified and deepened financial system through increased capacity of partner financial institutions (PFIs) to serve the women entrepreneur segment.
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