Presentation
The EInA initiative was born following the implementation in 2012 by the African Development Bank, of the Souk at Tanmia initiative, which directly supported nearly 800 entrepreneurs in Tunisia, Egypt and Morocco. The need to scale up and conduct strategic dialogue has given rise to eina4jobs, designed to influence reforms and flagship programs with a high impact on job creation.
EInA is financed since 2019 by the Dano-Arab Partnership Program (DAPP) and by the Youth Entrepreneurship and Innovation Multi-Donor Trust Fund (YEI MDTF).
In North Africa, very small and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs), because they represent the bulk of the productive fabric and contribute to about three-quarters of jobs, are at the heart of a crucial issue – the one that triggered in 2011 the Arab Spring: the fight against unemployment, especially among young people.
By monitoring the situation of entrepreneurship, ecosystems and public policies, eina4jobs encourages exchanges on good practices in order to meet the challenge of the “3 S”.
Scalability: responding to employment challenges by scaling up support for VSMEs and entrepreneurship.
Sustainability: promote innovative financing mechanisms in the form of public-private partnerships (PPP) allowing public funds to raise private funds.
Selectivity: choose the entrepreneur, the project and the support actors in a logic of performance.
Presentation of the team
Loubna Bourkane
Loubna Bourkane is Principal Employment Officer for the North Africa region at the African Development Bank. She has also managed projects in the field of employment and training in West Africa (Côte d'Ivoire, Cabo Verde, Togo, Senegal and Guinea Bissau). She contributed to the drafting of the strategy for youth employment in Africa and she launched the EInA platform in North Africa. Before joining the AfDB in 2010, she was in charge of education/training and local development projects for the French Development Agency (AFD) in Mauritania from 2008 to 2010. Loubna holds a master's degree in Development Economics from CERDI (University of Auvergne – France).
David Robalino
David Robalino, strategic advisor for the EInA platform, is an economist from Equator, specializing in issues related to jobs, entrepreneurship and public finance. He has worked on these topics in over 60 countries around the world in different international organizations including IMF, ILO, several regional banks, and the World Bank where he was the manager and lead economist of the Global Practice on Jobs. David is also a Senior Advisor for McKinsey’s Development Economics Practice. He currently serves as an advisor to the eina4jobs platform at the African Development Bank and is Professor of Public Finance and Economic Development at the American University of Beirut. David is a fellow of IZA, the German leading think-tank on labour economics and is a member of the economic council of the Millennium Corporate Challenge.
Adil Khalis
Adil Khalis, focal point for Morocco for the EInA platform, is a Moroccan economist, and specialist in entrepreneurship and employment issues. For the past 15 years, he has carried out strategic advisory missions on development issues for government departments and international donors. Before joining the eina4jobs team, he was in charge of the employment/entrepreneurship file as an advisor to the Head of Government of Morocco (2020-21).
Viviane Laure Mamno Wafo
Viviane Laure Mamno Wafo, a Cameroonian economist, is the coordinator of the EInA platform. She produces and participates from Dakar in the dissemination of various studies, monitoring and coordination of the dialogue between EInA governments and technical and financial partners. She holds a doctorate in applied economics specializing in gender from Cheikh Anta Diop University of Dakar (UCAD), Senegal.
Partnerships, an essential axis
By pooling the knowledge and synergies of various partners, "EInA" becomes a reference platform in the field of employment and entrepreneurship in North Africa.
From 2020, the platform has developed partnerships with the Moroccan Observatory of TPME (OMTPME), the International Labor Organization (ILO), the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) in Egypt, the Ministry of Finance of Morocco, as well as the Tunisian Ministries of Employment, as well as Industry and SMEs.
Through the regional conference on "the future of employment and MSMEs" on June 7 and 8, 2022 in Rabat, a new partnership dynamic has been initiated with the World Bank, German Cooperation (GIZ) in Morocco, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), the French Development Agency (AFD) as well as the Ministry of Economic Inclusion, Small Business, Skills Employment (MIEPEEC) in Morocco. These actors aim, like eina4jobs, to weigh in on the political dialogue to influence reforms and flagship programs, to drive change in order to make employment, entrepreneurship and MSMEs the engines of growth and sustainable development in North Africa.