Original source
Teaching business skills to support microentrepreneurs (2023)
J-PAL Policy Insights synthesis of 28 evaluations · Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL)
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Bundled Credit and Business Training
"Male entrepreneurs reported 54 percent higher profits, but the profits of female microentrepreneurs did not change."
Socio-Cultural Home-Location Constraints
"However, because many women preferred to operate their businesses from their homes, they couldn't generate sufficient income to sustain their ventures. As a result, there wasn't a net rise in female business ownership overall."
Gender-Focused Empowerment Business Training
"In Kenya, women with access to the training experienced an increase in weekly profits of 15.4 percent, or US$2.63, above the comparison group's profits three years after the intervention."
One-on-One Peer Mentoring
"In Kenya, new women entrepreneurs who worked with mentors increased their profits by 20 percent, but these effects faded after one year as mentors stopped receiving payments for attending the one-on-ones."
Personal Initiative Training
"In Togo, microentrepreneurs who attended a psychological training that aimed to foster an entrepreneurial mindset by teaching personal initiative increased adoption of business practices by 5.4 percentage points and profits by 30 percent relative to the comparison group 2.5 years after training."
Rule-of-Thumb Financial Training
"Teaching rules of thumb enabled small enterprise owners to increase profits by 23.5 percent in Uganda and 8.1 percent in Ecuador."
Tailored Single-Discipline Business Training
"The aforementioned program in South Africa, which consisted of eight hours of training per week for ten weeks and focused on one discipline, resulted in large increases in both businesses practices and profits."
Traditional Classroom Business Training
"A recent meta-analysis found that traditional business skill training programs for microentrepreneurs have modest impacts on key business outcomes, with sales rising by 5.6 percent on average and profits rising by 12.1 percent on average, which is insufficient to sustainably lift households out of poverty."
Workplace-Based Firm Consulting
"While a separate review of five evaluations found that consulting and business training for larger firms improved best practices and increased business profits, curricula that combine broad business principles like recordkeeping, accounting, financial management, and marketing may be less appropriate for the size, scale, or maturity of microenterprises."