Yara Barq

Yara Barq is an SME finance expert with over 15 years of accounting, banking, insurance, access to finance, SME lending, and financial training experience. She is the Investment Manager at Amam Ventures, Jordan’s first gender lens impact fund. Prior to Amam Ventures, Barq was the DCOP of the highly successful Jordan Loan Guarantee Facility (JLGF), a $250 million OPIC-funded Facility. In addition to DCOP, she also served as JLGF’s Credit, Gender, and Training Manager. Over her nearly eight years with JLGF, Barq helped in achieving the following goals: consenting 657 loan guarantees with the amount of $182M and $264M in disbursements, providing new employments to 8,000+ Jordanians, delivering 46 workshops to Financial Institutions and 60 workshops to SMEs.

 Prior to JLGF, Barq worked for over 5 years in Jordan’s financial sector, serving as an Accountant and Customer Relations Officer at Islamic International Arab Bank and an Accountant at International General Insurance.  Since the early beginning of the USAID JLGF in 2012, she conducted credit analyses, trainings, and technical assistance for SMEs within different industries including women owned businesses.

 Barq has a deep background in direct engagement with SMEs and innovative capital mobilization strategies. She designed and implemented more than 30 training workshops for bank officers, and venture capitalists in addition to over 35 workshops for SME owners on financial analysis, budgeting, business planning, financial literacy, and cash flow management. Barq has an MBA from German Jordan University Talal Abu-Ghazaleh College of Business and she is a Certified Expert in SME Finance, from Frankfurt School of Finance & Management.