Country: Jordan
Duration: 2021-2022
Themes: Strengthening the Business Enabling Environment, Expanding Access to Competitive and Contestable Markets, Promoting Technology Adoption to Raise Productivity, Supporting Entrepreneurship and SME Growth
Cross Cutting Themes: Gender, Digital, Climate
Anticipated Impact Areas: Quality Jobs, Private Investment, Productivity
The Challenge
The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on Jordan’s economy has been significant. Jordan’s unemployment rates have increased, and economic growth took a downturn. The pandemic has exacerbated the need for structural reforms as the country maps its post-pandemic recovery. To increase competitiveness and improve the quality of green investment, Jordan needs to exam climate change impacts on the private sector, related risks, opportunities, and priority policies to tackle challenges. Jordan has demonstrated its commitment to tackling climate change-related challenges by joining international treaties and launching a national green growth plan.
The Mission
Activities funded by C-JET have provided a major contribution to the Jordan Country Climate and Development Report (CCDR) covering the full analysis of greening the private and financial sectors. The CCDR aligns with Jordan’s economic modernization vision with the country’s climate change commitments toward long-term sustainability. C-JET provided analytical inputs towards adopting a climate-responsive economic modernization. The policy recommendations centered around implementing a cross-sector nexus approach to identify priority interventions for ensuring water-energy-food security. Overall, the recommendation seeks to align short-term benefits for the Jordanian people with the potential for creating long-term climate-responsive economic growth and protecting Jordan’s people, economy, and natural resources from climate risks.
Apart from helping inform policy measures, the project has developed and published a comprehensive green ecosystem map of stakeholders relevant to propagating Jordan's private sector green competitiveness. These are the first maps of this kind in Jordan focused specifically on green economy and greening the private sector. The map presents a comprehensive list of entities that support the green or eco-friendly entrepreneurship ecosystem of Jordan, such as finance, advisory services, educational institutes, media, governance, existing grants, and support organizations. These maps facilitate future engagements in the green competitiveness area as they help identify the right stakeholders in different sectors/areas of the green economy, providing their contacts, areas of expertise, activities, etc. Moreover, the project’s analytical work has been leveraged for the preparation of the World Bank’s lending operation “Jordan: Support for Industry Development Fund,” which has resource efficiency support to manufacturing firms and green transition of beneficiary firms as one of its components.
As a result, USD 78,995,000 in private capital has been mobilized through these interventions. 123 beneficiary companies have received financing through the project, of which women entrepreneurs lead 31 companies. Around 100 companies have since then introduced new products or processes to leverage green competitiveness.
