Growing Markets through Business Training for Female Entrepreneurs : A Market-Level Randomized Experiment in Kenya
A common concern with efforts to directly help some small businesses to grow is that their growth comes at the expense of their unassisted competitors. This study tests this possibility using a two-stage randomized experiment in Kenya. The experime...
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| Language: | English en_US |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2017
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| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/197441488550003248/Growing-markets-through-business-training-for-female-entrepreneurs-a-market-level-randomized-experiment-in-Kenya http://hdl.handle.net/10986/26243 |
| Summary: | A common concern with efforts to
directly help some small businesses to grow is that their
growth comes at the expense of their unassisted competitors.
This study tests this possibility using a two-stage
randomized experiment in Kenya. The experiment randomizes
business training at the market level, and then within
markets to selected businesses. Three years after training,
the treated businesses are selling more, earn higher
profits, and their owners have higher well-being. There is
no evidence of negative spillovers on the competing
businesses, and the markets as a whole appear to have grown
in terms of number of customers and sales volumes. This
market growth appears to come from enhanced customer service
and new product introduction, generating more customers and
more sales from existing customers. As a result, business
growth in underdeveloped markets is possible without taking
sales away from nontreated businesses. |
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