EU4Business: Annual report 2020

Nearly 80,000 small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the Eastern Partnership region received support through the European Union’s EU4Business initiative in 2019, generating €1.3 billion in extra income, according to the EU4Business annual report.

The 2020 report provides detailed information of EU assistance across all three priority areas of the programme: access to finance, business development services and the business enabling environment. In 2019, the EU disbursed €187.7 million to support a total of nearly 80,000 SMEs in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine, a third of which are owned by women. As a result, the companies created over 117,000 new jobs.

The report groups data, not by project, but by type of support and impact. This allows to highlight, compare, and analyse the results for each country, and to understand the relationship between implemented projects and the financial performance of SMEs.