BRAC Liberia's Small Enterprise Programme — Testing Soft-Skills Training Against Standard Business Training

BRAC Liberia's Small Enterprise Programme (SEP) provides business loans to small entrepreneurs across the country as part of BRAC's wider microfinance operation, which reaches over 100,000 borrowers through 55 branches in Liberia.
In a randomised controlled trial covering 570 SEP loan clients, researchers Ana Dammert and Aisha Nansamba tested whether adding interpersonal- and soft-skills content to BRAC's standard business-management training improved outcomes, compared with the standard training alone.
The combined training did not produce additional gains in profits or sales relative to standard training. It did, however, increase entrepreneurs' attention to customers, which was associated with higher average monthly revenue, fewer lost customers and a lower likelihood of business losses. Neither training arm changed customers' own reported satisfaction with the business.
The study, published in World Development in 2023, is a candid example of how a widely replicated NGO training model performs under rigorous evaluation: real but modest behavioural change, not the dramatic profit gains sometimes claimed for business-training programmes.

Read the full analysis: https://www.bracinternational.org/global-impact/liberia/