Kaizen Basic Managerial Training — Suame Magazine Metalworking Cluster, Kumasi

Suame Magazine in Kumasi is West Africa's largest informal vehicle-repair and metalworking cluster, home to thousands of small workshops with little access to formal management know-how.
In 2010, researchers Yukichi Mano, Alhassan Iddrisu, Yutaka Yoshino and Tetsushi Sonobe randomly assigned 167 small metalwork firms in the cluster to a short evening course (five days, 2.5 hours/day, costing about $740 per participant) combining the ILO's Start and Improve Your Business (SIYB) modules with an added Kaizen module on shop-floor waste reduction, workflow and basic quality control, against a control group that received no training.
A year on, trained firms were 8 to 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. Effects on sales, value added and gross profit were positive throughout but sensitive to sample specification: in the full sample (which includes entrepreneurs also exposed to a similar rival programme), the estimated one-year benefit was about 4,230 Ghanaian cedi per firm but not statistically significant; in the cleaner sub-sample that excludes those contamination cases, the effect on value added and gross profit became statistically significant, with an estimated gross-profit gain of about 13,400 cedi - roughly 18 times the training's cost per entrepreneur.
The Kaizen-plus-SIYB template tested here went on to be adapted for clusters in Vietnam and Tanzania by related research teams, making Suame Magazine an early proof-of-concept site for a management-training model since tested across manufacturing clusters in the Global South.

Read the full analysis: https://grips.repo.nii.ac.jp/?action=repository_action_common_download&item_id=1063&item_no=1&attribute_id=20&file_no=1