The COVID-19 pandemic posed unprecedented challenges to young people living in fragile states. We acted fast to safeguard their pathways to higher education and employment.

To support young entrepreneurs and protect jobs we increased access to finance and provided online training, mentorship and start-up competitions.

To ensure the continuation of higher education we facilitated a shift towards online and blended forms of learning.

To make sure nobody was left behind, we set up innovative interventions to reach communities without access to digital solutions.

In an unprecedented year, one thing didn’t change: the vital role played by our local partners. Thanks to their commitment and expertise we finished the year in a strong position to create an even better pathway to jobs for vulnerable youth.

Our efforts to create more employment opportunities in the region focused on: entrepreneurship; Small and Medium Enterprises (SME) support; and job placements for refugees.

To boost employment for Syrian refugees and host communities we launched a regional job creation programme across Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq (including the Kurdistan Region of Iraq) and Syria. Furthermore we invested heavily in tailoring our services better to Syrian entrepreneurs and students.

In Jordan and Iraq we worked with Microfund for Women to support SMEs and home-based businesses (HBBs) with technical assistance to scale-up their businesses and build resilience.

Throughout the year SMEs increasingly asked for support in accessing online sales opportunities. In cooperation with Hepsiburada.com we helped register women-owned SMEs and HBBs to its e-commerce platform, providing entrepreneurs with new sales channels to grow and safeguard jobs.

Surveys conducted by our local partner organisations showed that entrepreneurs, start-ups, existing businesses and business incubators urgently required access to financing opportunities.

To act on this input we partnered with Zitouna Tamkeen, the leading Islamic microfinance institution in Tunisia. This partnership developed and strengthened value chain projects, provided loans for existing and new Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) in five cities and ensured that companies received appropriate coaching over six months.

The results exceeded all our expectations: 266 loans were provided to youth and 92 loans were awarded to women-owned MSMEs. This led to the growth of 350 MSMEs, including 95 women-owned. 8 new MSMEs were created, half of them women-owned. Up to 378 jobs were created, while 461 jobs were sustained throughout the most critical lockdown period.

An extensive survey on our student alumni’s access to online education showed that almost 80% had no experience with online learning, with 44% asking for more academic support and 40% asked for psychosocial support. These results, plus discussions with our partners, led to serious programmatic shifts.

For example, in Lebanon, students were connected to a psychologist for online group sessions in wellbeing, coping with anxiety and depression, mindfulness techniques and time management. In Iraq, we hosted online learning sessions that led to first online classes and exams in the country’s history.

However, we found that many vulnerable young people are excluded from online education. With this in mind, we are working towards blended forms of learning, rather than fully replacing in-person teaching.

Historically the production levels of rural smallholder farmers (SHFs) in Rwanda have been impacted by limited access to markets and agricultural inputs. With the added challenges of COVID-19 restrictions, it was even more urgent for SPARK to roll-out its planned solution in 2020: a digital loan platform.

The platform provides farming cooperatives and SHFs with digital loans, lower interest rates and adjusted collateral requirements. It enables farmers to access digital bank accounts, control their own finances, create bankable data, cut travel costs and reduce transactional delays.

The loans are more accessible as farmers are scored by the bank on their historical records of supply at the co-operatives. This type of data collection is new in Rwanda, and represents a shift towards a more inclusive future in the financial sector.