Female entrepreneurs in developing countries face multiple challenges that constrain their ability to grow their businesses. Unprogressive social norms are widespread, and women lack the mobility, market access, capital, skills, information and social networks to build and grow their businesses. As a result, women-led firms are usually informal, small-scale, and operate from home. To obviate this problem, governments favour business training programmes. The evidence on their effectiveness is however scarce and mixed. Moreover, there are concerns related to the self-selection of participants, the high costs in running these trainings and the inability to empirically evaluate which training component is more conducive to firm growth. It is thus important to find ways to (i) improve their take-up, (ii) reduce their costs, (iii) disentangle the impacts of their different components, and (iv) identify policies to help the most dynamic entrepreneurs grow.
This project will address these four research questions; it aims to support female entrepreneurs with high-growth potential and test what works to help them achieve sustained growth. To identify these high-growth entrepreneurs, the researcher will rely on data on their profits or loan growth. The intervention involves offering online training to a random sample of female entrepreneurs in Pakistan, through which they will learn how to build and maintain networking skills. At the same time, the researcher will provide access to a social network via a WhatsApp group to a random subset of the trainees. After three months of the intervention, the researcher will carry out a survey to find out how the newly built network helped these entrepreneurs overcome informational constraints.
The collected data will shed light on the impact of networking skills training on women’s knowledge about building, maintaining and leveraging a network. Researchers will be able to build on this research by studying how this type of training and access to a professional network affects firm’s outcomes. This project is policy relevant because it can help governments in developing countries devise more cost-effective policies to help female entrepreneurs, so that they may overcome the many constraints they face to run and grow a business.
