Al-Khalifa with Gonzalez during the 2015 World Export Development Forum held recently in Doha. PICTURE: Shemeer Rasheed

By Peter Alagos
Business Reporter


Qatar Development Bank (QDB) has been ranked sixth in the International Trade Centre’s (ITC) list of top 10 global organisations on trade and investment promotions for its support structure for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).
Using the tool “AIM” or assess, improve, and measure, the ITC benchmarks global trade and investment support organisations such as QDB to help identify an institution’s areas of improvement and ways to measure its progress.
This was the first time QDB was benchmarked using AIM, said Arancha Gonzalez, executive director of the ITC, which has a membership of more than 170 countries, is a subsidiary organisation of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) and the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD).
“For QDB it was interesting for them to be benchmarked so they could understand what they were doing and where they rank in that scale. We benchmark the services that the organisation offers, quality of human resources, business processes they have in place, and their portfolio of activities. Across 10 indicators, QDB landed in the top 10,” Gonzalez said.
She added: “What is interesting with QDB is that it houses under one roof an entire value chain. It has the incubation, the support to boost SME competitiveness, it has a financing pillar, and it has the Tasdeer programme, which pushes the companies to the market.”
Aside from exports, Gonzalez also underscored the importance of tapping the strengths of the local market.
“Sometimes I prefer to talk about pushing companies to market rather than export because as Mr al-Khalifa said ‘the big markets that SMEs can exploit are here in Qatar’ – it’s the domestic market,” she said, referring to an earlier statement from QDB chief executive officer Abdulaziz bin Nasser al-Khalifa during the 2015 World Export Development Forum held recently in Doha.
Gonzalez said the ITC and QDB are discussing how to tap Qatar’s government procurement, which uses millions in goods and services every year from construction, energy, sanitation, health, education, and other sectors.
“One of the projects that we are going to work on is how to help SMEs become supplies to the state – tapping into the domestic market. This is why I like talking about connecting SMEs to markets and not necessarily exports,” Gonzalez said.
Gonzalez said al-Khalifa and the ITC signed the agreement two weeks ago in Geneva.
“We signed a collaboration agreement to help QDB map areas of potential competitiveness for Qatari SMEs and we’re going to be training a group of SMEs to be replicators of these efforts at building the human resources side in Qatar,” she said.