YouWiN! — Nigeria's Randomized Business Plan Competition for High-Growth Entrepreneurs

Nigeria launched a national business-plan competition in October 2011 (Ministry of Finance, Ministry of Communication Technology and Ministry of Youth Development, with World Bank and DFID support) to identify and support high-growth entrepreneurs, in a country where almost all firms have fewer than ten workers.

Select and fund promising business plans while generating causal evidence of impact, by using a lottery among similarly-scored finalists rather than ranking alone to decide winners.

Almost 24,000 applications were judged; between 2012 and 2015, federal spending exceeded $100 million across more than 3,000 winners, who received grants averaging $50,000; a second cycle was dedicated exclusively to women and produced 1,200 female winners.

Winning firms were substantially more likely to have started operating and survived, and were over 20 percentage points more likely to employ 10 or more workers than non-winners. Follow-on reporting put total net job creation at roughly 7,000 jobs, at an estimated cost of about $8,538 per job - well below the $11,000-$80,000 typical of comparable job-creation programmes.

The scheme was not sustained at its original scale after 2015 and functioned as one large cohort rather than an ongoing pipeline; roughly half of similarly-qualified finalists received nothing, drawing domestic criticism over fairness and disbursement delays. Kenya has since launched a similar competition, though no independent evaluation of it exists yet.