<p>The project aims to respond to the COVID crisis and the recent increase in demand for e-commerce due to the lockdowns in most MENA countries and the social distancing requirements that should last longer than the lockdowns. Retail businesses are struggling to find a way to reach customers and retain sales during this crisis.</p><p>The project will aim to support this challenge by offering women-led SMEs in MENA an opportunity to learn, in English, French and Arabic, about the fundamentals of doing business via e-commerce, managing logistics and utilizing digital marketing channels. These e-learnings will be delivered through a short series of webinars and facilitated, interactive online deep dive clinics.</p>
<p>ITC will contribute to an improved job potential through the generation of investment leads with European investors interested in investing into the partner countries of the Special Initiative (SI) for Training and Job Creation, which has been initiated by the Federal Ministry of Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ).</p><p>The overall objective of this project is to bring in non-financial European company investors into a joint project development process aiming to mobilize and to support the realization of private investment in the partner countries of the SI in order to create jobs. These investor companies aim to create sustainable jobs through green and brownfield investments in the target countries. The investment leads faciliated should have a particular potential to create jobs for women and youth. </p>
<p>Trade and exports are an important pathway for women to improve firm performance. E-commerce has opened up a new, more efficient way to connect producers and merchants to customers around the country and world, and has shown promise in helping small businesses who are challenged with reaching regional and international markets</p><p>The overall purpose of the project is to increase exports of women-led SMEs from Tunisia through Virtual Market Places as a new effective channel to expand export markets and benefit from new business opportunities. The ultimate objective is to create new jobs, particularly for women, and to ensure more inclusive and sustainable social and economic development. </p><p>The project will train and create a core group of 20 e-commerce advisors (majority women) that will provide coaching and advisory services to 130 women-led SMEs so that they use the VMPs as an effective way to promote and sell their products and services.</p>
<p>This project document proposes the establishment and piloting of a blended, non-accredited, vocational and practical training programme concentrated around the fundamentals of exporting and the opportunities resulting from the AfCFTA. This curriculum will be developed by the SME Trade Academy in collaboration with the Afreximbank.</p><p>Local partners, such as trade training institutions will provide support in implementation of the pilot programme in three countries, namely Nigeria, Rwanda and Côte d'Ivoire.</p><p>The pilot will involve building local partners’ capacity to market the training and conduct sessions on a continuous basis, localizing the offering for each national context.</p><p>An <strong><span style="color: rgb(184, 49, 47);">expansion phase</span></strong> has been added to the project involving a further 12 countries. The online training will be opened to all African countries.</p>
ITC’s Global Textiles and Clothing (GTEX/MENATEX) project in Tunisia aims to create jobs and increase the income of micro small and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) in the textile and clothing industry.
To that end, ITC is working with the government on policies to improve the sector’s business environment and the competitiveness of the clothing sector.
The project supports 50 companies in four sub-sectors of jeans, lingerie / swimwear, protective clothing, and a sub-sector of young local designers in clothing brands. Through training and mentoring programmes, beneficiary companies have the opportunity to increase their visibility in the global textile and clothing (T&C) market, participate in international fairs and improve their product portfolio according to the latest trends.
Textiles and clothing is the largest industry in Tunisia, contributing almost 20% of the country’s Gross Domestic Product. Companies export 95% of their production mainly to EU countries such as France, Italy, and Germany.
The COVID-19 pandemic hit the Tunisian textile and clothing sector hard. Commerce began reopening in 2021, showing an 11% increase in the first four months of the year. However, exports have not yet reached pre-pandemic levels.
To help survive these new challenges, through GTEX/MENATEX, ITC assisted companies to reorient their production to medical textiles and face masks. We also paired larger “champion” companies with smaller enterprises to help them overcome the crisis.
On the trade and investment support institutions side, the project helped institutions certify MSMEs that converted to the production of sanitary masks in response to the COVID-19 crisis. Thanks to these efforts, beneficiary companies were able to secure 3,500 jobs.
<p>In Central Asia and Tunisia, the programme will build on lessons learned and achievements realised in previous projects. Implementation, therefore, will kick-start with a well-defined approach. For the country projects in Egypt and Morocco a six month, an inception phase is foreseen to develop the country-specific approaches and fine-tune the interventions according to country priority needs and opportunities, as well as by taking into account the regional aspects already applied in the COM-TEXHA project.</p>
<p>Clothing is one of the largest industries in the world economy employing 60 to 75 million people worldwide. The negative social and environmental impacts of the fashion industry have been well documented, demonstrating that these impacts mostly occur within the upstream portion of the value chain. Improving traceability is a priority in order to determine how and where parts and components in production processes have been sourced and what are the environmental, social and health risks in the value chain. The action will support enhanced transparency and traceability in garment value chains, through the development of an IT 'track and trace' platform that offers customized and open self-assessment and data sharing solutions for value chain stakeholders. Alongside the implementation of this platform, ITC will deliver a training and continuous improvement programme and, in collaboration with private sector partners, implement in a subset of textile and garment oriented countries.</p>
ITC’s work in the Middle East and North Africa regions includes encouraging the exports of textiles and clothing to promote employment and income generation throughout the value chain. This includes focusing on institutional infrastructure and policy as well as product diversification, digitalization and e-commerce, social and environmental sustainability and gender inclusivity.
