evidoria

← Back to browse

Good practice Imported

Kaizen Management Training for Dar es Salaam's Garment Micro & Small Firms

Tanzania · Dar es Salaam · See the Tanzania profile · See the Dar es Salaam profile

Evidence: Randomised controlled trial Top 29% 76/100 · Ask Evidence Copilot about this practice

A randomised trial gave 113 Dar es Salaam garment micro/small firms classroom Kaizen training, one-on-one consulting, or both. By years 3-4, firms getting both had 90% higher sales and 65% higher value added than controls, but gains took years to appear.

+90%
Sales gain, combined training+consulting vs control (years 3-4) (2010-2014)
+65%
Value-added gain, combined training+consulting vs control (years 3-4) (2010-2014)
~US$10,000 more
Value-added gain, consulting-only arm vs control
US$2,000-4,000
Per-firm programme cost
113
Firms enrolled in the trial

Details

Maturity
Pilot
Promoter
Small Industries Development Organisation (SIDO) & GRIPS (National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies, Japan)
Period
2010-2014
Keywords
manufacturing, garment & apparel, SME development, vocational training

Context

Dar es Salaam's garment cluster is dominated by micro and small manufacturers with limited access to formal management training.

Objectives

Between 2010 and 2014, Tanzania's Small Industries Development Organisation (SIDO), with Japan's GRIPS and JICA, tested whether imported Kaizen management methods could raise firm performance.

Activities

113 garment micro/small firms were randomly assigned to one of four arms - classroom Kaizen training only, one-on-one on-site consulting only, both combined, or a no-intervention control - and tracked with repeated surveys over four years.

Results

In years one and two, none of the three treatment arms showed a statistically significant effect. By years three and four, firms receiving both training and consulting had average annual sales about 90% higher and value added about 65% higher than controls; the consulting-only arm alone raised value added by roughly US$10,000 more than the control group, exceeding the programme's per-firm cost of US$2,000-4,000.

Conclusions

The delayed pattern was informative: treated firms adopted many new practices soon after training but later dropped most, keeping only the smaller set that fit their operations - suggesting one-on-one consulting helps firms select the right practices to keep, rather than simply pushing more adoption.

Implementation
Indicative cost
Low (< €50k) — Per-firm cost of US$2,000-4,000 for the combined training-plus-consulting package, across 113 firms in four trial arms over 2010-2014.
Time to results
Long (> 3 years) — Four-year tracked intervention (2010-2014); performance gains only became statistically significant at the three-to-four-year mark, not in years one-two.
Staffing & skills
Classroom Kaizen trainers, One-on-one on-site consultants, SIDO field staff, GRIPS/JICA researchers running the survey rounds

Conditions for success

  • Combining classroom training with individualised on-site consulting, rather than either alone
  • Willingness to track firms for multiple years, since effects only became visible after year two
  • Delivery through an existing national agency (SIDO) with local reach

Common failure modes

  • Gains took three to four years to appear - a shorter evaluation window would have wrongly concluded the programme had no effect
  • Training-only and consulting-only arms alone were markedly weaker than the combined arm

Commonly funded by

National / regional programmes

Indicative funding routes for practices of this type — always check each programme's current calls and eligibility rules.

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.

Similar practices you may find useful