EU4Business in Ukraine shifts its focus to SME resilience support activities

The EU-financed  ‘EU4Business: SME Competitiveness and Internationalisation’ Programme will this month repurpose its regular activities to support the resilience of Ukrainian business during the current war.

In 2022, on request of the EU Delegation to Ukraine and the German Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development, the Programme will focus on the following emergency assistance packages for SMEs, primarily in the western and central parts of Ukraine: 

• Microgrants aimed at internally displaced businesses (IDBs) and other companies heavily affected by the war to continue operations and resume production lines.
• Consultancy support, provided by local and international experts in private sector development in fragile contexts, to help businesses re-orient business processes and strengthen their resilience. 
• Procurement of equipment for the programme partners, including SMEs, as needed to provide resources for their daily work and relaunching production. This includes IT hardware for digitalisation of documentation, business processes, backups and transition to cloud solutions; IT solutions for protecting online business processes, data protection, particularly against cyber-attacks; and direct support for SMEs, Internally Displaced Businesses (IDBs), and re-start of businesses via the partners. 

“In the context of war with unstable supply chains, fluctuating markets, riskier legal and contractual preconditions, enterprises require quick assistance to re-establish themselves and survive. The EU4Business Programme will rely on its established partner networks of business support organisations, local economic development agencies, regional chambers of commerce, business clusters, and “Diia.Business” centres to reach out to the most of Ukraine’s business community,” said Armin Hofmann, Programme Director of ‘EU4Business: SME Competitiveness and Internationalisation’. 

Find out more

Press release