When COVID hit in 2020, Liza Akter and her husband, Suruj Mia, had to close their seven-year-old aluminum factory in Dhaka and let their workers go. They moved back to their village in Shariatpur, Bangladesh, with two truckloads of aluminum machinery, only to discover there was not enough electricity to run them. They spent the last of their savings on a power connection and started again from scratch.
That was when a local microfinance organization told them about the World Bank’s Recovery and Advancement of Informal Sector Employment (RAISE) project. Soon, a $1,600 RAISE-supported loan helped change their trajectory. Today, the couple now runs six machines instead of two and employs around 10 workers.
Their story offers a glimpse of what social protection and employment programs can achieve when they help people build the skills, financial connections, and opportunities needed to earn a better living. It is also a timely example: the World Bank Group has now reached 259 million people through such programs, crossing the halfway mark toward its goal of reaching 500 million by 2030, known as SP500.
Liza and Suruj Mia are among more than 470,000 Bangladeshis—including 163,000 youth and 253,000 returning migrants—who have received employment support through RAISE, including financing, skills training, and coaching.
But RAISE goes a step further than other social protection projects: it uses public investment to help mobilize private capital for entrepreneurs.
The project has attracted $25.8 million in private financing, equivalent to about 17 cents for every public dollar committed by the World Bank Group. Much of that financing comes from 70 private microfinance institutions that invest their own funds alongside RAISE.
Why private capital matters for jobs
In Bangladesh, as in many developing countries, informal workers, and entrepreneurs make up most of the workforce. Yet they often struggle to access the financing they need to start or grow a business.
Limited skills, lack of collateral and documentation, and the absence of a formal credit history can make banks and other institutions reluctant to provide financing.
RAISE shows how public programs can begin to address that challenge.
The lesson has significance far beyond Bangladesh. Over the next decade and a half, some 1.2 billion young people will reach working age in developing countries, while only about 420 million jobs are likely to be created. Public resources alone cannot meet this challenge. Mobilizing private investment is essential.
The question is how to make that investment possible for people and businesses that financial institutions have traditionally viewed as too risky.
RAISE: Opening the door to private capital
RAISE has created three conditions that help make informal workers and entrepreneurs more attractive to lenders.
- Fix what keeps people out of accessing finance. Participants get technical training, business coaching, and a microfinance loan at subsidized interest rates. This allows them to establish strong financial management practices and build a track record of reliable repayment.
- Deliver through private lenders. The project runs through Palli Karma-Sahayak Foundation (PKSF), a Bangladeshi apex development organization which selected about 70 microfinance institutions to provide loans, services, and mentoring to local communities. These lenders also invest their own commercial capital into the program, taking on borrowers whose risks have been reduced through RAISE support.
- Create a path to mainstream banking. Once participants repay their first loan, they become more attractive to other financial service providers offering loans at regular market rates. Lenders gain long-term customers, and entrepreneurs gain lasting access to capital.
As Aneeka Rahman, Senior Social Protection Economist and Task Team Leader for RAISE notes, “The project shows that private investment works when public programs first fix the underlying barriers, such as lack of skills or credit history, that keep informal workers out of the mainstream economy.”
The implications extend beyond the RAISE project. Social protection and employment programs can help identify people who have traditionally been invisible to formal finance. With appropriate consent and safeguards, better information—combined with skills, coaching, and a record of repayment— can help lenders identify viable borrowers and connect more people to financial services.
In this way, data can become “the new collateral.”
read more: https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2026/11/05/mobilizing-private-capital-social-protection
