The United Nations Development Programme has said that difficulty accessing finance is a major obstacle to the operation and growth of businesses in Afghanistan, a barrier that has particularly affected small and medium-sized enterprises and women-led businesses.<\/p>\n
The agency said in a report released today, Thursday, 12 Sonbula, that to address this problem it has launched a programme called “Credit Guarantee” to help provide funding for small businesses, especially women\u2019s enterprises.<\/p>\n
According to the UN Development Programme, the scheme began in 2024 and has helped lenders, particularly banks, extend loans to more than 23,700 small and medium-sized businesses. The agency added that, as a result of the programme, jobs have been created for more than 47,000 people.<\/p>\n
The report said the “Credit Guarantee” programme has so far mobilised more than $71 million in private capital. Ibrahim Tombi, project manager at the UN Development Programme, said the programme is based on “risk sharing.”<\/p>\n
He explained that, under criteria set by the United Nations Development Fund, the private sector and banks are assured that they can support young people who have a business idea and motivation but do not have seed capital. According to him, the goal is for banks to lend more to businesses with growth potential.<\/p>\n
The UN Development Programme also said that the bulk of the businesses supported by the agency are small and medium-sized enterprises led by women. It added that for millions of women in Afghanistan, starting a business has become one of the few ways to earn an income, and UN support programmes are trying to create the conditions for this.<\/p>\n
According to the agency, from 2021 to 2025 the United Nations supported a total of 89,000 formal and informal businesses. Based on these figures, 91 percent of these businesses, nearly 81,000, are led by women.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
UNDP says poor access to finance is a major barrier for Afghan businesses, especially small firms and women-led enterprises.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":21001,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21002","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-business","category-important-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21002","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21002"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21002\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21001"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21002"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21002"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21002"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}