Mid-term Evaluation of the EBRD Women in Business Programme in the Eastern Partnership (EaP)

The EBRD Women in Business Programme in Eastern Partnership countries (EaP) was launched by the European Union (EU) in 2015 to promote women entrepreneurship and more broadly women’s participation in business, supporting women-led enterprises with access to know-how, access to finance and non-financial development services.

DG NEAR C1 launched the evaluation of the Women in Business to assess the relevance, effectiveness, efficiency, impact and sustainability, plus coherence and value added of the programme.

EU is funding through the Neighbourhood Investment Platform (NIP) this EBRD initiative with numerous sources of funding. This evaluation relys on a “contribution analysis” i.e. looking at the overall results of this given Women in Business programme and try to establish a logical correlation between those results and EU support. The evaluation should establish whether this programme is delivering results that would justify continued support by the EU (through new applications into the NIP). The overall programme (in the Eastern Partnership countries) is forming the scope of this evaluation.

The main objectives of this evaluation are to provide the relevant services of the European Union and the interested stakeholders with:

an overall independent assessment of the past performance of the Women in Business intervention, paying particular attention to its results measured against its objectives; contributing to learning by understanding what have been the factors that made these achievements possible or created obstacles to the results (their focus is therefore on why, not only on what)

to assess the programme in the light of other similar different access to finance programmes not targeting women (such as SME Finance Facility or DCFTA Facility) that are being implemented through PFIs. The evaluation should compare the added value of this programme and assess potential overlaps.

Outputs:

Inception and Desk note

Filed report

Final Evaluation report