Small and Medium-sized Enterprises

This paper reviews research on business incubators in Africa, as a policy tool for supporting entrepreneurial businesses.

This paper examines the effect of the extreme drought, which is caused by El Niño on firms’ performance in food and beverage manufacturing sector in Ethiopia.

Many small businesses in low-income countries hire employees from their kinship networks. This fact is often attributed to hiring from the kinship network reducing contracting frictions or informational asymmetries.

Organizational and managerial structure plays an important role in the productivity difference among firms. However, studies that assessed the quality of firm management and its link with their performance are still scanty.

Firm location decisions are one of the most important decisions managers make, optimizing factors such as proximity to customers, suppliers, and useful information.

We document capital contributions from workers to their employers in a representative sample of small firms.

We experimentally study the impact of relatively large enterprise loans in Egypt.

We document the trajectory of SMEs in Burkina Faso between 2020 and 2022, which were affected not only by the global Covid-19 shock, but also by several negative local shocks: two coups took place in 2022, in the context of increasing frequent terrorist attacks.

Female-owned businesses continue to be smaller and less profitable than male-owned firms. We conduct an RCT in Ghana on a sample of 1,771 growth-oriented female entrepreneurs to investigate the effect of online networking groups on firm performance.