Country: Liberia
Duration: 2021-2022
Themes: Expanding Access to Competitive and Contestable Markets, Promoting Technology Adoption to Raise Productivity, Supporting Entrepreneurship and SME Growth
Cross Cutting Themes: Climate, Gender, Digital
Anticipated Impact Areas: Quality Jobs, Private Investment, Productivity
The Challenge:
Two decades of civil war, the devastating Ebola Virus Disease outbreak and recurrent commodity price shocks contribute to reducing Liberia to one of the ten poorest countries in the world and without institutional resiliency to rebound. As the country was emerging from severe downturn, the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic compounded economic challenges in the country. The crises demonstrated the vulnerability of domestic small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) that rely only on local sales or access global supply chains through large concessions.
The Mission:
Through funding from C-JET, a grant will be implemented in Liberia by the World Bank to support an economic and recovery transformation project by laying the foundation for a comprehensive program aimed at strengthening firm capabilities to participate in a new automated, streamlined and quality compliant international trade regime through an anchor in-depth firm capabilities assessment. The anchor assessment aims at identifying the pool of trade exposed firms, and their needs, that could benefit from participating in the firm upgrading program under the project. These activities and more aim to connect firms to markets and raise capacity for firms to compete in those markets.
