evidoria

← Back to browse

Good practice Imported

Kaizen Basic Managerial Training — Suame Magazine Metalworking Cluster, Kumasi

Ghana · Kumasi · See the Ghana profile · See the Kumasi profile

Evidence: Randomised controlled trial Top 83% 52/100 · Ask Evidence Copilot about this practice

A 2010 RCT added a Kaizen module to SIYB training for 167 metalwork firms in Kumasi's Suame Magazine cluster: survival rose 8-9pp a year on; value-added/profit gains were significant in the paper's cleaner sample but not in the fuller one.

8-9 pp
Firm survival advantage vs. control (1 year)
13,400 GHS
Gross-profit gain per firm (clean sub-sample) (1 year)
740 USD
Training cost per participant

Details

Promoter
GRIPS (National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies, Japan) research team with SIYB/Kaizen trainers
Period
2010–2011
Keywords
manufacturing, metalworking, SME development, industrial clusters

Context

In 2010, researchers randomly assigned 167 small metalwork firms in Kumasi's Suame Magazine cluster — West Africa's largest informal vehicle-repair and metalworking cluster — to a five-day evening course combining the ILO's Start and Improve Your Business modules with a Kaizen shop-floor module, or to a no-training control group.

Results

A year on, trained firms were 8-9 percentage points more likely to still be operating than the control group; every firm that closed during the study was in the control group. In the sub-sample excluding contamination cases, the gross-profit gain was about 13,400 Ghanaian cedi per firm, roughly 18 times the training's per-participant cost of about $740.

Conclusions

The Kaizen-plus-SIYB template tested here went on to be adapted for clusters in Vietnam and Tanzania, making Suame Magazine an early proof-of-concept site for a management-training model since tested across manufacturing clusters in the Global South.

Implementation
Indicative cost
Low (< €50k)
Time to results
Short (< 1 year)
Staffing & skills
Research team (GRIPS), ILO Start and Improve Your Business trainers

Conditions for success

  • Short, low-cost training format (5 days, 2.5 hrs/day)
  • Combination of generic business skills with a shop-floor Kaizen module

Do you run this practice? Claim it — verified implementers get a public contact pathway and can propose corrections.

Data sources

Where this practice's information was retrieved from, and when.

Where it's been adopted

Documented replications and adaptations of this practice elsewhere.

PlaceWhenAdopterOutcome
Vietnam — Related research teams Kaizen-plus-SIYB training template adapted for manufacturing clusters.
Tanzania — Related research teams Kaizen-plus-SIYB training template adapted for manufacturing clusters.

Similar practices you may find useful