Publication: Testing the Promise of Digital Scaling: In-Person versus App-Based Training for Women Entrepreneurs
Loading...
Date
2024-12-05
ISSN
Published
2024-12-05
Author(s)
Editor(s)
Abstract
Business training has long been a staple of development policy, with annual expenditures exceeding US$ 1 billion in low- and middle-income countries. The vast majority of training is delivered in person, but there is growing interest in alternative modalities to deliver at scale. Digital delivery offers the potential to enhance impact, cost-effectiveness, and accessibility—especially for women, who may face constraints on their time and mobility. Challenges may include gaps in digital skills and ensuring participants’ engagement. This study conducted a randomized controlled trial to evaluate a business training program targeted at women entrepreneurs in Ethiopia. The paper tests two modalities: a smartphone app or in-person sessions, versus a control group. The findings reveal high initial take-up rates for both modalities (over 75 percent), but a significant disparity in completion rates (22 percent for the digital training, versus 71 percent for the in-person training). These results suggest that the potential of digital platforms for scaling up business training must be carefully tested and treated with caution. Despite the high take-up of in-person training, negligible impacts are observed on business practices and performance from either modality. This finding underscores the stylized fact that business training alone may offer limited benefits for women entrepreneurs.
Link to Data Set
Citation
“Cassidy, Rachel; Ebrahim, Menaal; Ubfal, Diego. 2024. Testing the Promise of Digital Scaling: In-Person versus App-Based Training for Women Entrepreneurs. Policy Research Working Paper; 10992. © Washington, DC: World Bank. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/42501 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”
Associated URLs
Associated content
Other publications in this report series
Publication Geopolitics and the World Trading System(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-12-23)Until the beginning of this century, the GATT/WTO system worked. Economic research provided a compelling explanation. It showed that if governments maximize the well-being of their own countries broadly defined, GATT/WTO principles would facilitate mutually beneficial cooperation over their trade policy choices. Now heightened geopolitical rivalry seems to have undermined the WTO. A simple transposition of the previous rationalization suggests that geopolitics and trade cooperation are not compatible. The paper shows that this is only true if rivalry eclipses any consideration of own-country well-being. In all other circumstances, there are gains from trade cooperation even with geopolitics. Furthermore, the WTO’s relevance is in question only if it adheres too rigidly to its existing rules and norms. Through measured adaptation to the geopolitical imperative, the WTO can continue to thrive as a forum for multilateral trade cooperation in the age of geopolitics.Publication Crops, Conflict and Climate Change(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-01-08)This paper studies the welfare impacts of agricultural shocks on households with detailed heterogeneity, by taking consumption, land, and labor allocation choices into account. The underlying model is quantified with household survey data from 51 developing countries, then used to analyze the welfare consequences of the food price hikes induced by the Russian Federation's invasion of Ukraine and future climate change. Both repress income and exacerbate inequality. War-induced food inflation reduced real household incomes across developing countries by 2.90 percent on average, while changes in yields due to climate change will reduce real incomes by 11.99 percent. The welfare impacts of both shocks vary enormously across the income distribution, with already vulnerable households bearing the brunt of their costs. Poor households suffer losses that are considerably larger and much more dispersed than those predicted by models that do not feature household heterogeneity and rely exclusively on aggregate data.Publication Impact of Temperature Uncertainty on Firm Growth(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-01-08)This study examines the impact of temperature uncertainty on firm fixed capital growth using a unique dataset that merges extensive firm-level financial data with detailed grid-level weather data. The analysis reveals a strong negative relationship between temperature uncertainty and fixed capital growth. Furthermore, the impact varies significantly across industries with differing levels of investment irreversibility and among countries with varying income levels. Firms in industries characterized by high investment irreversibility and those operating in higher-income countries experience more pronounced declines in fixed asset growth due to temperature uncertainty.Publication Trade Barriers or Catalysts? Non-Tariff Measures and Firm-Level Trade Margins(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-01-09)This paper empirically examines how standards and technical regulations affect export margins in three African countries at the firm level. The approach involves combining detailed customs transaction data at the firm-product level with bilateral information on non-tariff measures within a gravity model of trade framework. The findings show standards and technical regulations have no impact on the extensive margin of firm-level trade. However, they do diminish trade at the intensive margin in both the agriculture and manufacturing sectors. Small firms are more affected at the intensive margin compared to medium and large firms, and similarly, final goods are more affected compared to inter-mediate goods. Moreover, in the manufacturing sector, firms with initially higher product quality experience a reversal of the trade-reducing effect of standards and technical regulations, whereas in the agriculture sector, this effect is less pronounced for their counterparts. The results also suggest that African exporting firms face equivalent impacts in both regional and global markets.Publication Mapping Returns of Private Equity Investments in Emerging Markets(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-01-10)This paper fills a gap in research on private equity investments in emerging markets and developing economies. It provides descriptive evidence and examines the distribution of returns across sectors such as finance, technology, and resource-intensive industries like mining, where significant variation exists. Using data from the International Finance Corporation, the analysis finds that return distributions exhibit "fat tails", with a notable presence of investments yielding extremely high returns alongside others generating little or no return, highlighting the importance of diversification. The analysis reveals that firm-specific factors account for the largest share of return variability, with country and sector factors playing a smaller role. Gross domestic product growth and real exchange depreciation are significantly related to returns, with median elasticities of 0.35 and -0.67, respectively.