The campaign, entitled #PowerUpTrade, will run until the end of 2020 and will give entrepreneurs in LDCs an opportunity to explain how the crisis has directly affected their businesses by disrupting global value chains. The objective is to raise awareness of the bottlenecks and successes of traders in the world’s poorest countries and to reflect on ways to improve the inclusiveness of global value chains.

The pandemic has shown that crises affecting the multilateral trading system can have knock-on effects on companies and workers in LDCs across the world. This is due to the limited resilience of LDCs to issues affecting supply chains, markets, harvests and logistics.

The contributions published so far include the effect of COVID-19 on a coffee supply chain in Ethiopia, the impact of the pandemic on garment workers in Bangladesh, and how a women’s group in Samoa has responded to the COVID-19 crisis.

The digital campaign is co-organized by the EIF, the WTO, the International Trade Centre, the United Nations Industrial Development Organization and the non-governmental organization CARE.

The EIF is the only multilateral partnership dedicated exclusively to helping LDCs use trade as an engine for growth, sustainable development and poverty reduction. It is a unique global partnership between LDCs, donors and partner agencies, including the WTO, which work together to build trade capacity in LDCs.

The EIF’s Annual Report 2019 is available here. The French version can be found here.

More information on the EIF is available here.