Evaluation of the Small Business Initiative Phase I

Background

Consolidating the Bank’s dispersed SMErelated products under one roof in 2015, the Small Business Initiative (SBI) has been EBRD’s flagship SME programme in its Countries of Operation (CoOs). Phase I of the Small Business Initiative Evaluation was published almost a decade after this consolidation and focuses on the financing and advisory pillars of SBI. The evaluation investigates the effects of SBI’s internal organisation for efficient delivery and relevance to the Bank’s mandate, clients, and CoOs.

Main findings

The 2015 consolidation enhanced the Bank’s efficiency in delivering SME-related services, especially by streamlining approval processes within the Financial Intermediaries and Risk Sharing Frameworks, though gains were more modest for Direct Financing. The Small Business Initiative (SBI) generally aligned well with EBRD’s core priorities — green transition, gender empowerment, and youth inclusion — while its advisory services demonstrated agility during crises. Other findings suggest mixed results. Country-level planning within SBI enabled the integration of SME products partially, most successfully within SME F&D but not the rest of SBI. The evaluation further found that the SME sector transition gap assessment has not been updated since its introduction in 2016, underlining the need to update this element for accurate allocation of financing. Another important dimension of the evaluation was about management information systems, suggesting that the management information system for indirect financing inhibits transparency and informed decision-making. This pointed towards a need for a bespoke system to automatise data collection and processing. All in all, the evaluation suggests that SBI is a potential differentiator for EBRD vis-a-vis other multilateral development banks.