Blog

In the Western Balkans, Albania is witnessing remarkable economic growth propelled by foreign investment, infrastructure development, and a thriving tourism sector. Despite this positive trend, women-led businesses encounter uneven opportunities. As in many Western Balkans countries, women-led businesses in Albania tend to be smaller, concentrated in the services sector, and often constrained by factors such as limited networks and historical gender biases.

The USAID CATALYZE Engines of Growth (EoG) Activity and the USAID Diaspora Invest Project in Bosnia and Herzegovina are creating new investment opportunities in the country. While domestic family businesses have developed over generations, they need to prepare to find investors and for future investments. This was the driving force behind the organization of the “Family Business: Next Generation” workshop, which brought together representatives from 28 micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) from Bosnia and Herzegovina.

In the Western Balkans, women entrepreneurs face notable challenges in accessing finance, stemming from issues such as high collateral requirements, societal norms, and financial literacy gaps. USAID CATALYZE Engines of Growth (EoG) in the Western Balkans addresses these challenges by establishing a network of Business Advisory Service Providers (BASPs) and promoting alternative financing sources tailored to SME needs.Learning from Experience:

Belgrade, Serbia — September 15, 2023 — The USAID CATALYZE Western Balkans Engines of Growth (EoG) Activity successfully concluded its regional learning event, “Synergy in Learning: Catalyzing SMEs Financing in the Western Balkans,” held in Belgrade, Serbia on September 14th and 15th, 2023.

USAID CATALYZE helps women SMEs access new markets and grow

USAID CATALYZE Partners with Private Equity Fund to Ready SMEs for Private Investors Increasingly, global private investors are eyeing the Western Balkans as the potential for diversifying their portfolios. While private equity financing can raise working capital for a company through restructuring ownership and/or management, few small- and medium-sized business owners in the region are aware of, understand, or desire such a private equity model. In fact, many SME owners resist giving up power and ownership to outsiders.

This blog is written by Anila Behramaj.

This blog was originally published on the USAID Medium. By Dragana Todosijevic, USAID CATALYZE Engines of Growth (EoG)

In early 2022, the Western Balkans (Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia, and Serbia) started to emerge from the ravages of the COVID-19 pandemic, boasting rising industrial production, exports to the European Union (EU), increases in wages, and credit growth. The region is ripe for investment, but Russia’s war against Ukraine threatens this recovery, through higher energy and food costs, disruption in supply chains, and interruptions in trade.

Biljana Stanisavljva started her small business in Serbia in 2011, growing wheat and corn as a smallholder farmer. She wants to grow her business, but like many agricultural entrepreneurs, she finds it very challenging to obtain funds for her expansion plans. And as a woman, she faces additional challenges. Even after a decade as a registered business owner, she still has to rely on her husband for most business decisions. 

Third in a series of five blogs on the factors that contribute to sustaining and scaling private sector partnerships from the Enduring Results Study 3.0

(Second in a series of five blogs about the drivers of sustainability in USAID partnerships with the private sector based on the Enduring Results Study 3.0)

Worldwide, the private sector is playing an unprecedented role in shaping opportunities that improve the lives in the countries and communities that USAID supports. For six decades, USAID has partnered with the private sector to solve the world’s most complex development challenges and to help countries accelerate development progress. 

Youth — who make up a large portion of the potential workforce in developing countries — are often left out of markets systems, representing a significant lost opportunity to deliver social and economic benefits. 

In our recent webinar discussing the findings from the Feed the Future Advancing Women’s Empowerment (AWE) landscape analysis and case studies on women and youth inclusion in agricultural market systems, we were joined by RisiAlbania and ELAN RDC, two of the activities featured in the case studies. 

In order to analyze the impact of COVID-19 on dairy and beef value chains incorporating food security concerns such as availability, access and utilization, Land O’Lakes Venture37 and Georgian Farmers’ Association conducted a pulse survey in May 2020 of project participants in the USDA Safety and Quality Investment in Livestock project.

This blog post highlights how the RisiAlbania project, which sponsors youth employment and skills training programs in Albania, has invested in and adapted online learning and collaboration to local contexts in the face of COVID-19.

In Moldova, the “golden triangle” of collaboration among industry, government, and academia is transforming the technology sector. Here’s the recipe for success from the Moldova Competitiveness Project.

How can implementers use blended finance to mobilize capital? Chemonics and LixCap share their experiences with sequencing and explore its potential.

Congratulations to the three winners from the Collaborating, Learning, and Adapting (CLA) competition! These case studies demonstrate the use of CLA in the economic growth sector.

Strategic local planning and investment to facilitate housing, personal, and professional risk-taking, new market opportunities, and an entirely new vision of how housing could be delivered using the momentum of private initiative.

The USAID Agro Horizon project helped young entrepreneurs set up a dried fruit processing facility to produce trail mix, which allowed them to enter new supermarket chains and develop business skills.

Tajikistan is on the cusp of achieving its vision of a fully-functional market that allows land-use rights to be bought and sold.

This activity was one of four winners of Chemonics’ recent Market Systems and Youth Enterprise Development Innovation Contest.

The Government of Serbia is growing the MSME sector through public, private, education and civil society actors. USAID/Serbia asked the LEO activity to utilize organizational network analysis (ONA) to explore these networks' effectiveness.