Jedad : Promoting Market Opportunities for Refugee and Host Community Businesses in Jordan

Jedad is a business-to-business networking initiative supported by the World Bank team that aims to boost access to market and sales opportunities for micro and small enterprises (MSEs) in Jordan with a focus on refugee and women entrepreneurs. This initiative created an online platform that contains about 1500 businesses. The initiative, one of the first in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region (to the best of the project team’s knowledge), aims to boost the entrepreneurship ecosystem in Jordan by overcoming market frictions and information asymmetry to which refugee businesses are more prone to. Through the online platform, this initiative enables businesses and entrepreneurs to connect to potential clients by reducing the search costs for suppliers and buyers, which are often very high for the MSEs, particularly for the refugees, displaced, and women entrepreneurs due to their limited mobility. Besides the online networking platform, this project also provided an innovative product design support to 400 firms to help improve their product and service design thinking. To disseminate knowledge and to sustain online networking platform initiatives like Jedad beyond the end of this project’s funding, the team has also prepared a practical toolkit (including coding and necessary technical details) on how to build an online platform like Jedad. This toolkit will be publicly available so that anybody interested can create a similar or even a better platform than Jedad and advance the online business to business networking initiative in Jordan, MENA, and beyond.