Kafalah
Kafalah is the Saudi Small and Medium Enterprises Loan Guarantee Program, launched in 2006 to partially guarantee bank loans to SMEs.
Industry: SME loan guarantees | Location: Saudi Arabia | Founded: 2006
About Kafalah
Kafalah is the Saudi Small and Medium Enterprises Loan Guarantee Program. It partially guarantees loans that commercial banks and financing institutions make to small businesses, which reduces the lender's risk. Arab News reported in November 2019 that the programme was launched in 2006 as a joint development initiative between the Ministry of Finance and Saudi commercial banks to ease financing constraints on small and medium-sized enterprises.
At that time, according to the same report, Kafalah had partnerships with 30 bodies, made up of 26 banks and financing institutions and four government agencies. It had sponsored 7,321 establishments through the third quarter of 2019, and guarantees issued had reached SR16.9 billion. The report said the Small and Medium Enterprises General Authority, known as Monsha'at, planned to allocate funds to support the programme and treated enhancing Kafalah as one of its initiatives.
The SME Bank website, read in October 2026, lists Kafalah, the National Development Fund and SVC as entities connected to the bank. That page does not describe the relationship itself.
Sharikat Mubasher reported on 28 September 2025, citing a Monsha'at report, that Kafalah provided SAR 85.4 billion in total guarantees to SMEs in the second quarter of 2025. The report said the total value of products and initiatives launched by the programme exceeded SAR 120 billion in that quarter and that 25,801 SMEs had benefited since its start. It added that about 7.8 percent of participating SMEs moved from micro to small and 3.9 percent from small to medium.
Abdul Latif Jameel Finance said in its 2025 board report that Kafalah gave it a gold award for SME financing. A TechScoop article of 20 September 2026 lists Kafalah among names associated with the lending platform Abwab.ai.