eTrade Alliance Principles – what we stand for
​
-
We share a vision for the historic opportunity opened by ecommerce and digitization to enable small businesses around the world to engage in trade, grow, and create new, well-paying jobs, and to promote inclusive growth.
-
We set out to create online markets and opportunities, especially for traditionally underserved segments such as women-led firms, rural firms, and the youth, in order to bolster societies’ full productive capacities in the global digital economy.
-
We believe in the power of public-private partnerships to accelerate countries and companies’ digital transformation and the development of new, sustainable online markets, deepen the impact of development interventions, and discover and test innovative, win-win solutions.
-
We believe in a free and fair Internet as the bedrock of the global digital economy and support the adoption of policies conducive to key enablers of MSME cross-border ecommerce, including free cross-border data flows, free trade in digital goods, strong cybersecurity, and interoperable digital ecosystems.
-
We seek holistic solutions where our “whole” is larger than the sum of our parts, offering world-class digital, commerce, payment, talent development, financial, and logistics services to enable MSMEs in ecommerce.
-
We support MSMEs through different stages of their digital journeys, providing MSMEs with applied learning on platforms, solutions, and services to grow their domestic and international online sales.
-
We promote business and regulatory practices that facilitate MSMEs’ cross-border trade, including simplified border processes for trade in low-value items, broader use of technologies that automate trade compliance and customs risk management, and facilitation of hinterland and last-mile logistics through technology.
-
We champion innovative methods to expand access to cross-border payments and financing solutions for MSMEs in ecommerce, such as through Fintechs that provide online working capital loans, technology-driven trade finance solutions for small transactions, and new guarantee instruments that scale the reach and impact of alternative finance.
​
-
We believe that no asset is as important for success in the global digital economy as human capital. We promote technology-driven methods to assess and accelerate countries and companies’ digital readiness, help match the right talent to the right jobs, and promote the development of workforces poised to adjust to rapidly changing technology and business models.
-
We approach ecommerce development with a startup mindset, rigorously diagnosing challenges in specific markets and segments, piloting and testing new solutions to these challenges, and cataloguing our impacts, learning from our work, and improving iteratively, in order to arrive at impactful solutions that scale.
​
These views do not necessarily reflect the views of every Alliance partner company, USAID or U.S. Government.
​
​
​