SME and entrepreneur
training, delivered.
Hands-on e-commerce and business training for programme participants, in Arabic and Turkish. Thirteen modules covering the store, the payment gateway, the logistics and the law — with your own trainers delivering by the second cohort.
Built for SPARK: 1,315 certified and 381 live stores. Run at national scale for the Social Development Bank: 3,525 stores.
If your participants have no device and no connectivity, training is the wrong first spend.
What the engagement gives you. Programme volume — families trained, stores delivered, hours run — sits in section 8 with the client work, where it evidences capability instead of opening with our own output.
A programme that ends at the
business plan produces
business plans.
Conflict-affected and low-income regions are not short of entrepreneurial ambition. What is missing is specific and operational, and it is exactly the part that gets cut when a syllabus is written to a budget.
The gateway nobody could open
Most participants on the Jordan programme had no bank account, which is ordinary given how low financial inclusion runs across the region. International marketplaces require a card or a PayPal account before a seller can be paid at all. A curriculum that teaches selling online without solving that has taught a theory.
The shipping rate they could not reach
Courier discounts require a registered business and a signed contract. Informal producers are quoted retail rates that make an export order unprofitable before it is packed. On the Jordan programme this was solved by routing shipments through registered businesses, which is an operational arrangement rather than a lesson.
The platform that does not speak to them
Established international marketplaces offer no platform support in Arabic. For owners with limited formal education — the majority of the women in the Jordan sample — that is not an inconvenience, it is the whole barrier. The report names it as the reason the platform was built in Arabic.
Every one of the three is operational rather than educational. They are also the three a training budget is most likely to treat as somebody else's problem, which is how a programme reaches its attendance target and none of its trading ones.
The curriculum,
opened.
This is the thirteen-module e-commerce curriculum built for SPARK, bilingual in Arabic and Turkish. Open any module to see what is inside it. Modules six to eleven are the ones most programmes never reach.
01Introduction to e-commerce
Opportunities, constraints and the business models available. Which of them fits a home-based producer with no warehouse and no staff, and which of them does not.
02Planning your venture
Market research, product strategy and revenue models. The decisions that are expensive to reverse once a catalogue is photographed and listed.
03Building the online store
Platform selection, setup and day-to-day management. Done with the owner rather than for them, because the person who set it up is the person who can fix it.
04User experience
Design fundamentals and usability testing. Enough to know why a buyer left, which is a different skill from knowing that they did.
05Privacy and cybersecurity
SSL, data protection and payment-card compliance. Unglamorous, and the module that stops a small store losing its gateway three months after launch.
06Digital marketing
Search, paid search, social and content. Run as campaigns against a live catalogue rather than as a lecture, because the cost of acquiring a customer is the number that decides whether a micro-business survives.
07AI productivity tools
Using AI to do the work of a team that does not exist: product copy, translation, image preparation and customer replies. The module that changes most between cohorts.
08Customer service
Measuring satisfaction and holding on to a buyer. Repeat purchase is the cheapest revenue a small store will ever have and the one nobody plans for.
09Payments and logistics
Gateways, shipping partners and fulfilment. On the Jordan programme this meant setting participants up with a local e-wallet so they could receive a card and transact at all.
10Legal and regulatory
Türkiye's e-commerce law, GDPR and intellectual property. Written against a jurisdiction rather than in general, which is the only version of this module that is any use.
11Growth, funding and cross-border export
Indicators, investor readiness and entering the Saudi market. Cross-border access was one of the three gaps SPARK asked the curriculum to close.
12E-commerce careers and team roles
What the roles are and what they do, for participants who will end up employed in the sector rather than running a store in it. Both are good outcomes and only one is usually counted.
13Common pitfalls and how to avoid them
The failures we have watched happen, written down. This module exists because the previous twelve describe what to do, and most people learn faster from what went wrong.
Every module carries quizzes, downloadable templates and indicator trackers. Ten weeks from brief to a validated, trainer-ready curriculum: two weeks of needs analysis and learner personas, six weeks of build with weekly sprint reviews, two weeks of trainer guide, upload and live question sessions.
You can see the difference
training made, because it is
in the product.
Skills training is usually evidenced with attendance sheets and self-reported confidence scores. On the Jordan programme it was evidenced with the goods, before and after — and the World Bank published the photographs.
Why this is the honest evidence
A trained participant who cannot show you anything different has learned something you cannot verify. A redesigned product is a claim that checks itself.
It also survives translation into a funder's report better than a satisfaction score, because a photograph does not need a methodology note.
And what it does not prove
A better product is a necessary condition and not a sufficient one. Of the seventy producers taken through the full design cohort, thirty sold. The rest improved their goods and still did not find a buyer inside the programme's window.
Anyone selling you training as a route to guaranteed revenue is describing a different world from the one in the published table.
Four thousand families,
one repeatable path.
The Social Development Bank came to us with over four thousand Saudi families running home businesses and no digital presence. Training at that volume is a throughput problem before it is a pedagogy problem.
Front-load the irreversible decisions
What to sell, how to price it, how to take payment, how it gets delivered. Teaching those four first means the store gets built once instead of rebuilt in month three, which at four thousand stores is the difference between a programme and a queue.
Train while the store is being built
1,670 hours of training ran alongside store creation rather than before it. An owner who has just chosen her pricing is the one who should be setting it up that week, while the reasoning is still in her head.
Standardise the path, not the business
The same checkpoints for every family and no template for what they sell. The variance that damages a programme at this scale is variance between delivery staff, and a fixed path removes most of it without flattening the businesses.
- 4,100+Families trained
- 3,525Fully functional stores delivered
- 70%Of trainees were women
- 1,670Training hours delivered
Masar 3500, with the Social Development Bank and MakanE, Saudi Arabia, 2023–2024. Participants completed 1,750+ orders and generated 523,000 SAR in sales in the first three months.
Ten weeks to a curriculum
somebody else can teach.
The shape below is the SPARK build. The sequencing matters more than the durations: validation happens weekly against real participants rather than as a sign-off at the end.
A curriculum validated only at sign-off is a document everyone agreed to without using.
Three programmes,
all named.
SPARK · Türkiye
The thirteen-module curriculum on this page. 1,315 refugees certified and 381 live e-stores launched, with a 100% satisfaction rating from the client.
- Curriculum
- Bilingual AR/TR
- 381 stores
Social Development Bank · Saudi Arabia
Masar 3500, with MakanE. The volume engine in section 6 — a repeatable path from enrolment to a working storefront, run for over four thousand families.
- National scale
- Home businesses
- 70% women
The World Bank · Jordan
Training and support for 400 firms, with design mentoring on top for the tiers that needed it. Every figure on this page from that programme is in the client's published report.
- Published report
- 400 firms
- Design mentoring
Umbrella500 is the only partner we found that blended business strategy, e-commerce execution, and not-for-profit empathy.
Halil Can EmreProject Manager · SPARK TürkiyeMost training providers hold one of those three. The reason we hold all three is that our founders ran an e-commerce platform before they taught anyone about one — 1,000+ businesses across MENA launched on it.
Training volume, 2019—2026
The first two are sums of documented projects rounded down, and they overlap in population by design — a trained entrepreneur and a digitised business are frequently the same person. We publish both and never a third reach metric on top. The third figure is the training footprint specifically; company-wide delivery covers five countries.
Four times training
is the wrong spend.
Two of these have cost us work and we would say them again.
- The participants have no device or no connectivity. Nothing in the thirteen modules survives that. The first spend is hardware and data, and a training budget spent ahead of it produces a certificate and a phone that cannot load a dashboard.
- They cannot legally receive money. Where participants have no route to a bank account or an e-wallet, solve that first. We did it inside the Jordan programme by partnering with a local provider, and it took real time that was not in the training plan.
- The mandate is accredited vocational education. Formal accreditation, qualification frameworks and awarding bodies are a different industry with a different compliance burden. We build practical curricula that end in a trading business.
- You want a one-day workshop for a launch event. We will decline politely. A day produces enthusiasm, and enthusiasm without the operational modules is the thing this whole page argues against.
Umbrella500's approach was both strategic and practical — bridging vision with execution. The programme created real, measurable outcomes for our beneficiaries.
Giacomo De GiorgiSenior Consultant · The World BankHe is also a co-author of the report every Jordan figure on this page comes from — alongside our own co-founder, who is the third of its four named authors.
The ones that decide it.
Can we use only some of the modules?
Yes — they were built mixable for exactly that reason, so the same material serves a six-week programme and a six-month one. We will tell you which ones we think you cannot drop, and modules nine and ten are usually on that list.
Who delivers it — you or our trainers?
Both, in that order. We deliver the first cohort alongside your trainers, then move to the back of the room. The trainer guide is written for someone who was not in the design sessions, which is the test that matters when your staff change.
What language does it run in?
The SPARK curriculum was authored bilingually in Arabic and Turkish rather than written in English and translated. English is available. If you need a fourth language we will say what that costs rather than imply it is a formatting job.
How do you measure it?
Stores live, orders received and sales made, instrumented from week one. Attendance and completion are inputs and we report them as inputs. If your funder's framework requires attributed income change, that needs a comparison group and we will say so during design.
Can it be delivered online?
Partly. The modules carry micro-videos, quizzes and templates that work remotely and were built to. The parts where somebody sits with an owner and connects a payment gateway do not transfer well to a webinar, and that is the part the outcome depends on.
What does a participant actually have at the end?
A live storefront, a connected payment route, a listed catalogue and a delivery arrangement — plus the templates and trackers to run it. On the SPARK cohort that produced 381 live stores from 1,315 certified participants, which is a ratio worth agreeing before you start.
How do we start?
A thirty-minute call about the cohort, the languages and the timeline. If there is a fit we propose a short diagnostic before quoting a curriculum, because writing one before meeting the cohort is how programmes end up teaching the wrong five modules well.
Tell us who is
in the room.
The cohort, the languages and what they need to be able to do at the end. We answer in a day, usually less.
Or write directly: [email protected]