A stratified RCT with Addis Ababa businesswomen found formal business training raised profits and sales by 0.21 standard deviations and business practices by 0.13 SD; a follow-on peer-mentoring stage improved mentees' practices but not their profits.
Three-year post-training evaluation, published 2021
Keywords
women entrepreneurship, business training, mentoring, microenterprise
Context
In Addis Ababa, researchers affiliated with the World Bank's Africa Gender Innovation Lab ran a stratified randomized controlled trial with women-owned microenterprises to test whether business training, followed by peer mentoring, could ease the managerial constraints that keep women's businesses small.
Activities
In the first stage, experienced businesswomen received formal business training targeting managerial capacity. In a second stage, some of the trained women became mentors, delivering customized mentoring to other women microentrepreneurs from within their own social and business networks. Outcomes were tracked across three rounds of post-training surveys over three years.
Results
Business training raised profits and sales by 0.21 standard deviations and adoption of good business practices by 0.13 standard deviations. The mentoring stage produced strong gains in mentees' business practices, but no statistically significant effect on mentees' profits.
Implementation
Indicative cost
Low (< €50k)
Time to results
Medium (1–3 years)
Staffing & skills
World Bank Africa Gender Innovation Lab, academic co-authors
Conditions for success
mentors selected from among already-trained businesswomen
mentoring delivered within mentors' own existing social and business networks
Common failure modes
mentoring improved mentees' business practices but produced no statistically significant effect on their profits
Commonly funded by
Philanthropic / foundation funding
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.
A World Bank/ACDI-VOCA RCT trained 197 experienced Ethiopian businesswomen who then mentored 1,128 less-experienced peers. Over three years, mentor training …
FINCA Perú added 22 short entrepreneurship-training sessions to routine village-bank meetings for 4,591 mostly female microfinance clients in Ica and …