Impact of Afghanistan government support on SMEs' growth level: The case of AREDP covered SMEs in herat province

Afghanistan Rural Enterprise Development Program (AREDP) is one of the largest governmental SMEs development programs in Afghanistan since 2011. The aim of this research is to investigate the impact of this program support on SMEs growth level in Herat province of Afghanistan. 4 years secondary panel data of 127 out 146 covered SMEs of this province used for this research. The number of direct, indirect & and total employees of the SMEs is used as an indicator of growth. Therefore, depended on variables of this study are the direct, indirect and total number of SMEs employees. AUGUST categorical supports (soft skill training, vocational training, exhibitions and machinery & toolkits) & It supports which are combined with 13 individual supports of this program are treatment variables. startup capital, owner's education level, dummy variables for gender and business type of SMEs are used as control variables in this research. Ordinary least square (OLS) model & Stata 64 software are used for data analysis. Overall, it has been founded that the government support has a positive significant impact on SMEs growth level except for one type of support (vocational training) which is negatively related to the number of employees. we also find an interesting result from control variables. This study provides evidence for policymakers to prioritize government support for better SMEs development in order to achieve containable economic growth in the country.