Up and Running

Jordan ranked 75th in the General Index of Doing Business out of 190 countries participating in the 2020 report, to jump in an unprecedented way compared to its ranking during the year 2019 which was ranked as the 104, out of 190 countries. Jordan advanced in a total score of 7.7 points to reach 69 percentage points out of 100 during the current year’s report, as it is considered the highest point rate achieved by Jordan in The history of Doing Business reports.

This remarkable progress came as a result of the reforms it implemented during the past years. For the first time, Jordan is included in the list of economies with the most notable improvements in Doing Business in last year. The most prominent indicator that Jordan Improved is the index of (Getting credit) at about 60 points, the index of Resolving insolvency by about 9.4 points, and the index of paying taxes by about 7 points.  

In spite of these reforms aren’t exploited as required by the stakeholders, and this is due to the lack of sufficient awareness of these reforms from SMEs. While SMEs play a major role in most economies, particularly in developing countries. SMEs account for the majority of businesses worldwide and are important contributors to job creation and global economic development. 

They represent about 98% of businesses and more than 60% of employment in Jordan. Formal SMEs contribute up to 40% of national income (GDP) in emerging economies. The main issue for SMEs is the lack of access to financing. The reason that they cannot access financing from banks is that they do not have the ability to put up collateral and lack credit ratings. 

So we need to increase awareness for these reforms, especially in a new secured Movable assets law. SMEs do not have sufficient awareness of the effectiveness of the amendments that got the law, and they are not aware enough of the benefits of the amendments, and this may slow down the process of progress and development in the economy and the expansion of SMEs and access to the financing that they want.  

We aim to empower SMEs through raising the awareness in amendments in movable assets, so they can use this knowledge to enhance their (and others’) access to financial well-being, and expanding SMEs work, thus creating more job opportunities for Jordanians, and it comes as a real solution to the biggest problem that Jordan faces which is unemployment.

We also believe that we need to encourage the banking sector to create new products that fit with these law amendments. That’s why we aim to raise the awareness of SMEs and the Banking Sector in movable assets law that have been published to facilitate access to finance, through two rounds as follows:

Round 01: We aim to raise awareness of SMEs and the Banking Sector, through running different types of videos non-stop throughout the 10 months, such as informative videos and interactive videos.

Round 02: We aim to encourage the Banking Sector to create new products that fit with these law amendments, and those products will help SMEs to enhance their financials and create more jobs, through running different types of focus groups once every two months for 10 months.