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Good practice Imported

UDEC Business Training for PRIDE Tanzania Microfinance Clients — Dar es Salaam's Randomised Trial and Its Local Follow-Up

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

Evidence: Randomised controlled trial Top 97% 38/100 · Ask Evidence Copilot about this practice

A 2008 randomised trial gave over 300 PRIDE Tanzania microfinance clients in Dar es Salaam classroom business training from UDEC. Knowledge gained was real; a later handover to local trainers showed impacts were weaker than the original research-led course.

300 clients
PRIDE Tanzania clients trained in the trial (autumn 2008)
UDEC Business Training for PRIDE Tanzania Microfinance Clients — Dar es Salaam's Randomised Trial and Its Local Follow-Up

Details

Maturity
Pilot
Promoter
University of Dar es Salaam Entrepreneurship Centre (UDEC) & PRIDE Tanzania
Period
2008–2010
Keywords
Microfinance, business training, entrepreneurship education

Context

In autumn 2008, the University of Dar es Salaam Entrepreneurship Centre (UDEC) delivered classroom business training to clients of PRIDE Tanzania, the country's largest microfinance institution, as part of a randomised field experiment in Dar es Salaam.

Objectives

Isolate the causal effect of classroom business training on business skills, attitudes and practices by randomly assigning microfinance clients to receive the training or not.

Activities

More than 300 PRIDE Tanzania clients were randomly assigned to training or control; the experiment was designed by Kjetil Bjorvatn and Bertil Tungodden and first circulated as a Chr. Michelsen Institute working paper in 2009.

Results

The trial found a positive average treatment effect on business knowledge, with the largest gains among entrepreneurs with less formal education - though this same group also attended less consistently. A later follow-up study, tracking the programme's handover from research-led delivery to routine local implementation, found real-world impacts were measurably weaker than in the original trial.

Conclusions

Ensuring high and consistent participation is critical to realising training's benefits, and 'success in local implementation cannot be taken for granted' when handing off pilot training programmes to local partners at scale.

Implementation
Indicative cost
Low (< €50k) — Classroom training delivered to a several-hundred-client research sample; no budget figures given in available sources.
Time to results
Medium (1–3 years) — Training delivered autumn 2008; original evaluation published 2010; a separate follow-up study assessed the later local-implementation handover.
Staffing & skills
Classroom trainers from UDEC delivering the curriculum, Research team (Bjorvatn & Tungodden, CMI) for design, randomisation and evaluation, PRIDE Tanzania as microfinance-institution delivery partner

Conditions for success

  • High and consistent participant attendance, especially among less-educated entrepreneurs who showed the largest knowledge gains but attended least consistently
  • Careful randomisation infrastructure to enable causal identification

Common failure modes

  • Handover from research-led delivery to routine local implementation produced measurably weaker real-world impacts, per the follow-up study
  • Author conclusion: 'success in local implementation cannot be taken for granted'

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Data sources

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