Growing with Your Business: How a Structured Support Model Transformed 12 Olive Oil Producers in Belsh

UNDP Albania

July 9, 2026

Growing with Your Business: How a Structured Support Model Transformed 12 Olive Oil Producers in Belsh — In a small Albanian municipality built on olive groves and family tradition, twelve local businesses have just closed out a six-month journey that turned informal, locally-scoped operations into structured, export-ready enterprises.

UNDP Albania

In a small Albanian municipality built on olive groves and family tradition, twelve local businesses have just closed out a six-month journey that turned informal, locally scoped operations into structured, export-ready enterprises. Between October 2025 and April 2026, the "Growing with Your Business" (GYB) programme worked hands-on with olive oil and table olive producers in Belsh — and the results offer a genuinely instructive model for what effective, targeted SME development looks like in practice.

GYB is a proven international business support methodology that UNDP has implemented in more than fifteen countries over the past sixteen years, consistently used to strengthen SME competitiveness and integrate smaller producers into larger value chains. In Belsh, it was delivered under the "Business Partnerships and Solutions for Sustainable Development Goals" project — funded by the Government of Sweden and implemented by UNDP in partnership with FAO, ILO, and UNIDO, working closely with the Municipality of Belsh as the local anchor.

That combination of funding, implementing agency, and specialised UN partners matters. It meant the programme could draw simultaneously on agricultural expertise (FAO), labour and enterprise standards (ILO), industrial and quality standards (UNIDO), and UNDP's broader development and market-access networks — rather than offering a single generic training package.

The strength of GYB lies in the fact that support was not abstract advice — it was concrete, resourced, and sustained. Each of the twelve beneficiary businesses received:

210 hours on average of one-to-one business consultancy — intensive, continuous, and tailored to that specific business's constraints, not a generic curriculum.
Up to 78 hours of structured training, spanning financial management, marketing and social media, Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP), the 5S workplace methodology, and sustainable business practices.
A grant of 270,000 ALL (~€2,800) earned for productivity-enhancing equipment, infrastructure upgrades, or branding and commercial image development.
Coverage to participate in at least one national trade fair, giving even the smallest producers a stage they could not otherwise afford.

This is the first lesson worth underlining: the programme paired knowledge (consultancy and training) with capital (the grant) and market access (trade fairs, B2B events) in the same intervention. Isolated, any one of these elements tends to produce limited results — training without capital rarely allows a business to act on what it has learned; capital without technical guidance is often misallocated. Together, they created the conditions for compounding improvement.

A Staged, Diagnostic Methodology. Equally important was how the support was sequenced. GYB followed six deliberate stages: pre-diagnosis (selecting the right beneficiaries), business diagnosis (understanding each company's actual practices and gaps), design of improvement plans, capacity building, business strengthening (implementation), and finally promoting business relations and formalising results.

In Belsh with @UN_Albania RC @MacdonaldIngrid and Head of Development Cooperation at @SwedeninAL and our @RandiDavisUNDP to see @UNDP & @FAO 's joint support to the olive oil value chain. — In Belsh with UN Albania RC, Ingrid Macdonald and Head of Development Cooperation at Embassy of Sweden in Albania and UNDP Albania Resident Representative, Randi Davis UNDP to see UNDP & FAO 's joint support to the olive oil value chain.

UNDP Albania

This staged approach avoided the common failure mode of development programmes that jump straight to training or grants without first understanding what a specific business actually needs. By spending the first two months purely on selection and diagnosis, consultants ensured that later interventions — the training modules, the grant spending, the market linkages — were targeted at real bottlenecks rather than assumed ones. The programme also built in a final stage explicitly focused on formalising supply-and-demand agreements and evaluating results, which meant the intervention had a defined endpoint and an accountability mechanism, rather than fading out informally.

Why is this Transformative? Aggregated across the twelve businesses, the outcomes are striking:

Average 28% increase in customer base, reflecting genuinely improved market reach, not just anecdotal growth.
100% adoption of Good Manufacturing Practices — up from just 4 of 12 businesses at the outset, a fundamental shift in food safety and workplace standards across the entire cohort.
25,777,200 ALL (~€270,000) in private co-investment — a 7.8x leverage ratio on donor funding. This is arguably the single most important figure in the entire booklet.
14+ new jobs created, contributing directly to local employment.
A 92-percentage-point increase in structured marketing practices adoption.
Full adoption of key social media channels across all supported businesses.

The leverage ratio deserves particular attention. Grants provided to companies averaged roughly €2,800 per business, yet businesses collectively reinvested nearly eight times that amount of their own capital. That is not something a grant can force — it reflects genuine buy-ins. Businesses that had spent decades operating informally, often financed through family remittances from years working abroad, chose to commit substantial private capital on top of the programme's support once they saw a credible path to growth. That is the clearest evidence that the intervention was trusted, not merely tolerated.

Aldo Jolla and his wife holding their rebranded products.

UNDP Albania

The pattern holds up at the level of individual businesses. Jolla Olive Oil, founded by a family returning to Belsh after two decades of emigration, used the programme to build a full export identity and secured an exclusive supplier-distributor partnership with Jolla Imports LTD in the UK — investing roughly €45,000 of its own alongside the programme's support.

Today, Sagelo Olive reflects a renewed identity—modern, professional, and ready for new markets.

UNDP Albania

Sagelo Olive, an established exporter since 2008, used GYB to formalise traceability systems and add four new export customers. Paja Olive Oil went furthest on product innovation, launching a certified organic olive oil line for both the Albanian and U.S. markets. Smaller, newer entrants — like Dumrea Olive Oil Factory, founded only in late 2024 — used the same framework to professionalise from a standing start, achieving a 70% year-on-year increase in customer base.

The Farmer Who Finally Felt Seen — The Growing with Your Business methodology provided something Gëzim rarely experienced: Tailored, consistent, practical support. Paja Olive Oil began to see its future more clearly. What once felt like a small, family-run operation with big dreams started transforming into a business with structure, strategy, and direction.

UNDP Albania

What unites these otherwise very different businesses is that each received a package calibrated to its own stage of development: an established exporter needed traceability and B2B linkages; a brand-new entrant needed a first commercial identity and basic digital presence. The methodology flexed to the business, rather than forcing every participant through an identical template.

Businesses part of the GYB methodology participating at the Annual Agricutlrual Fair in Lushnje. — Businesses part of the GYB methodology participating at the Annual Agricultural Fair in Lushnje.

UNDP Albania

What Made This Success?

Diagnosis before prescription. A full month was spent understanding each business before any improvement plan was designed — avoiding generic, one-size-fits-all interventions.
Capital paired with capacity. Grants were not stand-alone; they were released alongside sustained one-to-one consultancy and structured training, ensuring money was spent with technical guidance.
Market access built in, not left to chance. Trade fair participation, B2B engagement, and institutional meetings (such as with FENIX I.C.) were structural components of the programme, not afterthoughts.
A credible, repeated methodology. GYB's track record across 15+ countries, and 16 years gave both funders and beneficiaries confidence the model works — this was not an experimental pilot.
Strong local co-investment as the real signal of success. A 7.8x leverage ratio shows businesses trusted the process enough to put their own capital behind it — the truest measure of a programme's credibility.
Coordinated multi-agency backing. Sweden's funding combined with UNDP, complementary expertise gave the intervention a breadth that a single-agency programme could not have matched.
A defined exit and evaluation stage. By formally concluding with results evaluation and sustainability planning, the programme avoided the common trap of open-ended support with no clear endpoint.

GYB is a proven international business support methodology that UNDP has implemented in more than fifteen countries over the past sixteen years, consistently used to strengthen SME competitiveness and integrate smaller producers into larger value chains.

UNDP Albania

“The Belsh case demonstrates that transformative SME support does not require enormous sums of money — it requires the right sequence of diagnosis, tailored capacity-building, modest but well-targeted capital, and genuine market access, delivered by partners with credible track records. Twelve family businesses, many financed by emigration remittances and built on generations of olive-growing tradition, are now measurably more competitive, more compliant, and more visible — locally, nationally, and in several cases internationally. That combination of grassroots authenticity and structured professionalisation is precisely what makes this programme worth studying as a model for other rural, agriculture-based economies”-says Eno Ngjela Programme Specialist at UNDP.