We design and deliver programmes with development organizations, governments and banks — training people to sell online, then building the stores they sell from.
This page carries every number we publish, and the projects each one is counted from. Where a figure cannot be traced to a named project, it is not here.
Each aggregate is the sum of documented projects, rounded down to a defensible number. The arithmetic is below.
Aggregates are where impact reporting usually stops being checkable. Ours are sums of named projects, so you can take any published figure apart and put it back together.
Businesses digitised and selling online
Counted once each. A business that was also trained appears in the figure below, but never twice in this one.
Entrepreneurs and professionals trained
Training and digitisation overlap in population — the same person can appear in both figures. They are never joined to a third reach number.
Both are rounded down. 5,406 is published as 5,000+ and 6,915 as 6,500+, because a figure that rounds up is a figure that has to be defended. Per-project numbers are exact and carry no plus sign; aggregates are rounded and carry one.
A digitisation programme for refugee and host-community businesses in Jordan. Catalogues photographed, payments connected, delivery arranged — and the owner trained to run all of it after we left.
Three years on the ground, running to early 2020.
Training for Saudi families starting home businesses, and a working store for each of them at the end of it. Three quarters of the people we trained were women.
523,000 SAR in participant sales generated in the first three months. Stated in riyals, because that is the figure that was counted.
A bilingual e-commerce curriculum for refugee entrepreneurs, built in ten weeks and taught to certification. Every graduate who wanted a store finished with one running.
100% client satisfaction across the partnership.
A social platform for SPARK's entrepreneur network — community infrastructure, knowledge sharing and events in one place. Six weeks from brief to launch, with the existing community moved across intact.
A green-economy programme led by SPARK, which we partner on. It is running now, so it carries no results yet — the figures will be published here when the programme reports them, and not before.
Four organisations account for every figure on this page.
We work between two ecosystems — the Middle East's growth and Europe's standards. Programmes run where the entrepreneurs are; the team runs from Amman and Luxembourg.
Most programmes are measured on the day they close. The number that matters arrives a year later, and it is the one we want to keep reporting.
The measure of a programme is whether the shop is still trading after everyone has gone home.
If you are designing a programme and need the delivery side to hold — training, storefronts, measurement — tell us the outcome you are accountable for and we will tell you whether we can move it.
Or write directly: saleem.najjar@umbrella500.com