About US

100+ free online courses

The SME Trade Academy boasts over 100 free online courses across its different platforms in a variety of languages, including English, French, Spanish, Arabic, and more!

600,000+ trained

The SME Trade Academy has recorded over 600,000 individual enrollments in its courses and delivered over 150,000 certificates of completion, helping boost the international trade skills of people all around the world, including in traditionally underserved developing and least-developed countries.

Who we are and what we do:

The SME Trade Academy is a part of ITC. Our mission is to digitalize all of ITC’s group trainings, both online and in-person, in order to enhance them through the application of digital learning technologies. We work in partnership with ITC project managers, business support organizations, academic institutions and development agencies to build and deliver learning solutions to ITC’s beneficiaries in developing environments.

The SME Trade Academy provides interventions to meet the following needs:

Online training:

The Academy supports projects by building e-learning courses, entire curriculums, and virtual learning spaces for communities. We also provide support to ITC’s technical sections via virtual workshopping solutions to help teams reach beneficiaries remotely.

In-person and instructor-led training:

The Academy provides solutions for both digital and digitally-supported workshops.

In-person

Online

Synchronous only

Both

Asynchronous only

Digitally supported workshops

Digital workshops

Training of trainers

Virtual workshops

E-learning

Learner & Content Management System (LCMS)

Data

- Register events, dates, place, time etc.

- Register participants and results

- Course materials

- Content repository

- Certificate register

- Attendance register

- Course evaluations

- Course reports

We enhance ITC’s face-to-face training and advisory services by applying digital learning technologies. We work in partnership with ITC project managers, Business Support Organizations, private sector companies and content partners to deliver the courses and trainings in formats tailored for each specific target audience using different technologies.

Our public offering

The SME Trade Academy provides a public learning platform that contains over 100 free e-learning courses on export development, sustainability, trade support, entrepreneurship, e-commerce, and market analysis. While our target audience mostly consists of micro, small and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs), mostly located in developing and least-developed countries, our training also reaches other relevant participants, such as government agencies, policymakers, members of international organizations, trade and investment support institutions (TISIs) and academia.

Diploma level education

The SME Trade Academy offers one-year Diploma Programmes in international trade at Levels III and IV to participants in selected countries in partnership with the United Kingdom’s Institute of Exports and International Trade (IOE&IT). The Academy also offers a one-year International Diploma in Supply Chain Management via a group of 30 network partners in Africa and Asia.

AI integration in e-learning courses

In 2024 the SME Trade Academy piloted an AI-powered course with more that 400 actively registered learners. The existing SMETA online course, Raising Funds for Your Business, was selected for this initiative and enhanced with three AI personas and nine AI-powered questions. The pilot aimed to assess the impact of AI integration on learning outcomes, learner satisfaction, completion times, and completion rates in an e-learning course. Specifically, it explored whether mastery learning techniques — where learners repeatedly attempt a task and receive personalised feedback until they achieve a certain level of proficiency — could be effectively replicated online. Click here to learn more about the outcomes of this pilot.