Peace Through Prosperity: economic empowerment programmes

2010 to present

Peace Through Prosperity reports reaching 4,000+ micro-entrepreneurs since 2012.

The pressure

Squeezed out

PTP describes its Yemen participants running their small businesses during the country's civil war.

Peace Through Prosperity, Four Years in Yemen (December 2022), p. 5.

What people did

  • PTP reports training 483 participants across nine cities in Yemen: Sanaa, Aden, Hudeidah, Ibb, Taiz, Amran, Hajjah, Seiyun and Dhamar. The average cost was $82.85 per participant from 2019 to 2021 (Four Years in Yemen, pp. 4-5).
  • In Egypt, PTP trained 111 micro-entrepreneurs, including refugees from Sudan, South Sudan, Eritrea, Yemen and Syria alongside local Cairene traders. Profitability improved 52% against baseline, with partial data for some groups (Almost a Year in Egypt, pp. 3-4).
  • PTP's Impact page reports reaching 4,000+ micro-entrepreneurs since 2012 and 85% average profitability growth across 974 mini-MBA participants in Pakistan and Egypt from 2012 to 2022.

What held

PTP describes Yemen's participant cohorts becoming support groups, with members providing one another emotional and material support (Four Years in Yemen, pp. 5-6).

What didn't

PTP reports that 92 Yemen participants stopped their businesses, some because their businesses were loss-making. During the war, average profitability fell 37% and revenue fell 30% among the 2019 to 2021 participants (Four Years in Yemen, p. 5).

What you can borrow

Sources

Programme figures and reported outcomes are attributed to Peace Through Prosperity, not presented as independently evaluated findings. The impact figures are from PTP's Impact page. Author's disclosure: Kubair Shirazee co-founded Peace Through Prosperity in 2010.