Africa Gender Innovation Lab

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The Gender Innovation Lab (GIL) conducts impact evaluations of development interventions in Sub-Saharan Africa, seeking to generate evidence on how to close the gender gap in earnings, productivity, assets and agency. The GIL team is currently working on over 50 impact evaluations in 21 countries with the aim of building an evidence base with lessons for the region.

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  • Publication
    Unlocking the Potential of Women Entrepreneurs in Uganda: A Brief of Policy Interventions
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-08-26) Copley, Amy; Gokalp, Birce; Kirkwood, Daniel
    Private sector development is an integral channel through which countries can better leverage the productive potential of the youth bulge, support job creation, and maintain social stability. Entrepreneurship already plays an important role in Sub-Saharan Africa, where forty-two percent of the nonagricultural labor force is self-employed or is an employer, the highest rate in the world. Women business owners in Uganda face several gender-specific barriers to their enterprise performance, including lower levels of innovation, lower use of capital and labor, and segregation into lower-value sectors. This brief focuses on the policy interventions that can help empower women entrepreneurs across Uganda.
  • Publication
    Monitoring COVID-19 Impacts on Firms in Ethiopia: Does the COVID-19 Pandemic Affect Women-Owned Firms Differently
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-09) Abebe, Girum; Bundervoet, Tom; Wieser, Christina
    As COVID-19 continues to disrupt the Ethiopian economy, a major concern is that the pre-existing gendered challenges facing women entrepreneurs, in access to capital and hired labor, for example, will worsen, further undermining the survival and performance of women-owned firms. However, very little data exist to monitor the gender differences in impacts brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore, in April 2020, the World Bank launched a high-frequency phone survey (HFPS-F) of a random sample of firms in Addis Ababa to collect detailed information on firm operations, hiring and firing, and expectations of future operations and labor demand. The analysis that follows draws on the three rounds of the HFPS-F survey implemented between April 15 and June 18, 2020, consisting of a balanced panel of 454 firms from Addis Ababa.
  • Publication
    Re-Thinking Firm Level Data Collection during COVID-19: Using Mobile Sensing to Understand the Financial Behaviors of Entrepreneurs
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-08) Alibhai, Salman; Buehren, Niklas; Cucagna, Maria Emilia
    SMEs around the world are entering a crisis period in light of COVID-19, adding new urgency to understanding firm-level financial behaviors and challenges. At the same time, traditional methods of in-person data collection pose a health risk to both enumerator and firm and contravene social distancing guidelines and public health policies. Remote data collection methods such as phone sensing offer a viable and promising alternative. Phone sensing utilizes data generated from mobile phone usage, from GPS location to call logs to battery life – to offer insights on firm behavior, trends, and challenges. While the technology is still new and untested, this note explores some of the early insights gained from a pilot of mobile sensing technology to understand the financial behavior of women entrepreneurs in Ethiopia. Phone sensing data allows us to glean some insights into the lives and behaviors of entrepreneurs which traditional data collection might not reveal. One of the key finding of this pilot is that mobile phone sensing data correlates with business outcomes. Insights such as the ones from this pilot, if collected at a larger and more systematic scale, could enhance our understanding of borrower behavior, and could help lenders and policymakers better target potential borrowers, better understand when borrowers are likely to face adversity, and better design products to meet their needs.
  • Publication
    Competing Priorities: How Household Income Management Affects Women’s Microenterprises in Urban Ghana
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-01-08) Pierotti, Rachael; Friedson-Ridenour, Sophia
    Cash grants often lead to increases in business profits for male entrepreneurs, but not for female entrepreneurs. This study identifies key household-level factors that constrain women’s ability to grow their business. Through in-depth qualitative research, it provides evidence that intrahousehold relationships influence the business decisions of female microentrepreneurs in urban Ghana. Intrahousehold relationships constrain the decisions women make about their businesses in three primary ways: 1) women hide income and sometimes limit investment in an effort to reinforce their husband’s responsibilities as a primary provider and secure sufficient support, 2) women prioritize savings to meet daily household needs, cover shortfalls in their husband’s financial support, and take care of emergencies, and 3) marital insecurity encourages women to dedicate business income to long-term investments independent of their husbands, such as property or children’s’ education. Efforts to support women microentrepreneurs will need to address barriers to women’s ability to meet daily household needs and to plan for long-term security, in addition to relieving capital constraints. Policy responses could include increasing security by improving marital property rights for women or improving social safety nets to change the calculus that leads women to prioritize savings over investment.
  • Publication
    GIL Top Policy Lessons on Empowering Women Entrepreneurs
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-01) World Bank
    Women make up more than half of the total number of entrepreneurs in Africa. Yet, on average, for every dollar of profits men entrepreneurs earn, women entrepreneurs earn 66 cents. Supporting women to grow their firms would translate into higher economic growth for Sub-Saharan Africa.
  • Publication
    Are Mobile Savings the Silver Bullet to Help Women Grow Their Businesses?
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2018-09) Bastian, Gautam; Bianchi, Iacopo; Buvinic, Mayra; Goldstein, Markus; Jaluka, Tanvi; Knowles, James; Montalvao, Joao; Witoelar, Firman
    In Tanzania and Indonesia, we promoted the expansion of mobile savings accounts among women micro-entrepreneurs and provided them with business related training. In doing so, we simultaneously relaxed supply- and demand side constraints to savings that women might face. In both countries, the training enhanced the impact of promoting mobile savings. In Indonesia it led women to save more overall, including a nascent use of mobile accounts, and report greater decision making power within the household. In Tanzania, it led to substantially higher mobile savings, new businesses and products, more capital investment, labor effort, and better business practices. However, these short-term impacts have yet to translate into higher business profits. In Indonesia, we observe increased household welfare, but no discernible effects on business outcomes shortly after the training ended. In Tanzania, the increased business investments were not accompanied by greater profitability.
  • Publication
    Designing Targeted Business Trainings for Impact: Insights from a Women Entrepreneurs' Program in Tanzania
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2018-07) Bardasi, Elena; Gassier, Marine; Goldstein, Markus; Holla, Alaka
    Business training in low-income countries have scarcely shown impacts on revenues and profits, especially for female entrepreneurs. In this study, we test two kinds of trainings, one basic in-class training and one enhanced version supplemented with individualized coaching, to test their respective impact on women with established small businesses in Tanzania. We found that targeting the right entrepreneurs can improve the effectiveness of a tailored training and even lead to improvements in performance. We also determined that the content and delivery method of business support provided to the female entrepreneurs impact their adoption of business practices.
  • Publication
    Personal Initiative Training Leads to Remarkable Growth of Women-Owned Small Businesses in Togo
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2018-01) Campos, Francisco; Frese, Michael; Goldstein, Markus; Iacovone, Leonardo; Johnson, Hillary; McKenzie, David; Mensmann, Mona
    Standard business training programs aim to boost the incomes of the millions of self-employed business owners in developing countries, by teaching accounting, marketing and other basic business skills. However, research shows limited impacts of this traditional business training approach. Through an experiment in Togo, we introduced the personal initiative training program, a new and effective psychology-based entrepreneurship training that outperforms traditional business training. The personal initiative training increased firm profits in Togo by 30 percent relative to a control group, compared to no significant impacts from a traditional business training. Personal initiative training led to more than just a boost in profits for micro entrepreneurs. After the training business owners were more innovative, introduced new products, borrowed more and made larger investments. The personal initiative training was particularly effective for female entrepreneurs, for whom traditional training has often been in effective. Women who received personal initiative training saw their profits increase by 40 percent, compared to 5 percent for traditional business. This study’s findings make a strong case for the role of psychology in better influencing how small business training programs are taught in West Africa and beyond. It shows the importance of developing an entrepreneurial mindset in addition to learning the business practices of successful entrepreneurs. Based on these promising results, the personal initiative training is being implemented in programs in Mozambique, Mauritania, Ethiopia, Jamaica, and Mexico.
  • Publication
    From Learning to Earning: An Impact Evaluation of the Digital Opportunity Trust Entrepreneurship Training
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2016-09) Alibhai, Salman; Buehren, Niklas; Papineni, Sreelakshmi
    Business and entrepreneurship training programs have become popular interventions intended to boost the profits of small businesses around the world. Despite their popularity, rigorous evidence on the impact of entrepreneurship training programs is thin. Indeed, a recent systematic review of published literature on entrepreneurship training noted that although entrepreneurship training programs are widely distributed and attended by tens of thousands of entrepreneurs globally, the majority of these programs have not yet been evaluated and thus their effects have not been verified. In October-November 2014 baseline data on 800 female entrepreneurs in Mekelle was collected. 400 of these female entrepreneurs were randomly assigned to the treatment group and offered to participate in the Digital Opportunity Trust (DOT) training immediately and the other 400 entrepreneurs were assigned to the control group and had to wait a minimum of 12 months before being offered the training. The first round of training was offered to the treatment group from January 2015 in half-day sessions over a period of 15 to 20 days at no cost to the participants, so that entrepreneurs could complete the training while continuing to attend to their businesses on a daily basis. From January to March 2016, approximately one year after the treatment group was offered the training, the research team followed-up with 729 female entrepreneurs of the original sample. The results in this policy note are intention-to-treat (ITT) impacts, i.e. the impact of being offered training, using the midline survey data. The preliminary results from this study confirm that a more innovative (non-cognitive skills based) type of business training can more effectively support women’s businesses. Additionally, participants of the DOT entrepreneurship training tend to be the lower performing businesses (measured by business profits), so reaching the higher performing businesses may require other training delivery mechanisms such as on-site consulting or coaching. This finding has particular relevance for those programs that are targeting specific types of entrepreneurs. Further research will rigorously examine the longer run impacts of the program and will attempt to uncover the missing piece of the puzzle of how entrepreneurs translate business training into business success.
  • Publication
    Female Entrepreneurs Who Succeed in Male-Dominated Sectors in Ethiopia
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2015-10) Alibhai, Salman; Buehren, Niklas; Papineni, Sreelakshmi
    In developing countries, female entrepreneurs have low returns. Yet, the few women who cross over into traditionally male-dominated sectors double their profits. So why don't more women cross over? When parents and husbands support them, women are more likely to cross over. When they lack information on the earnings potential in male-dominated sectors, they are less likely to. This suggests a path to promote women entrepreneurs crossing over. The challenges Ethiopian women face in getting jobs and earning income come from a range of sources. Women start from a more difficult situation than men --without easy access to finance, land, training, education and effective business networks. The share of women in Ethiopia without education is almost twice that of men, which in turn limits women entrepreneurs' ability to grow their businesses. Reducing gender inequalities in education and the labor market could increase annual GDP growth in Ethiopia by around 1.9 percentage points.