2023

Self-Sustenance Skills Interventions in a Rohingya Refugee Camp

Researchers:
  • Austin Davis
  • Pursey Heugens
  • S.M. Musa
  • Katrin Smolka
Location:
Bangladesh
Type:
  • Pilot project
This project compares two entrepreneurial mindset training interventions (personal initiative training and effectuation training) in their capacity to support the self-sustenance of Rohingya refugees in the Kutupalong refugee camp. It is the first project that...

2022

Enhancing the enterprise development capacity of SMMEs: Evaluating the impact of Phaphama SEDI

Researchers:
  • George Kinyanjui
  • Kholekele Malindi
  • Moegammad Nackerdien
Location:
Cape Town and Stellenbosch (Western Cape), South Africa
Type:
  • Project development grant
The growth and success of small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMMSEs) has been pivotal in advancing economic and social development for many low- and middle-income countries. While gains have been achieved in unlocking the potential of SMMEs in South Africa...

The impact of digital and online marketing skills training on youth's business sales and profitability

Researchers:
  • Livini Donath
  • Jaah Mkupete
  • Francisco Mugizi
  • Emmanuel Mwang'onda
Location:
Dar es Salaam and Dodoma, Tanzania
Type:
  • Pilot project
In Tanzania, 11.8 percent of youth are unemployed, and most are female. It is estimated that about 400,000 youth enter the labor market annually to compete for only 40,000 jobs created in the economy. Existing evidence shows that youth lacks formal employment...

Enabling Entrepreneurs: An Impact Evaluation of a Business Incubator Development Program in Uganda

Researchers:
  • Annet Adong
  • Bisrat Gebrekidan
  • Matthias Rieger
  • Emmanuel Rukundo
  • Sarah Schroeder
Location:
Kampala, Uganda
Type:
  • Pilot project
In the post COVID-19 era, Uganda will rely on the capacity of small and medium-scale enterprises (SMEs) to re-start growth. Supporting SMEs to grow and gain scale is therefore central to both government and the private sector. However, SMEs face two main types...

Facilitating International Remote Work for New Graduates in Malawi

Researchers:
  • Robertson Khataza
  • Makaiko Khonje
  • Jennipher Musa
Location:
Malawi
Type:
  • Pilot project
Does facilitation of international remote work have potential as an economic development intervention? For job-seekers in low- or middle-income countries, the international remote job market offers the prospect of a much larger pool of potential jobs at...

Short term Apprenticeship Training and Labor Market Outcomes: Experimental Evidence from Ghana

Researchers:
  • Prince Adjei
  • Rebecca Nana Yaa Ayifah
  • Isaac Doku
Location:
Ashaiman-Greater Accra Region, Kasoa-Central Region, Kumasi-Ashanti Region
Type:
  • Project development grant
Youth unemployment is a major problem facing most low- and middle-income countries including Ghana. In Ghana, youth unemployment is beginning to take an upward trajectory from 8.9 to 9.4 percent from 2019 to 2020 due to limited skills needed to secure jobs. As...

Evaluating Labor Market Outcomes of Education Assistance Programme: Evidence from Randomized Control Trial in the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa

Researchers:
  • Ronelle Burger
  • Dumisani Hompashe
  • Kholekele Malindi
Location:
Eastern Cape
Type:
  • Project development grant
As economies have suffered from volatile economic cycles, including the recent COVID-19 pandemic, enhancing employment opportunities among the youth has taken center stage in development policy discussions in low- and middle-income countries, especially in sub...

Digitization Effects in Equilibrium

Researchers:
Location:
Ashanti Region (Kwabre East and Juaben districts)
Type:
  • Pilot project
While the economic effects of digitization in low- and middle-income countries have been studied extensively, the general equilibrium effects of digitizing business payments along the supply chain and on neighboring businesses have been less explored. In this...

Worker Monitoring, Motivation, and Productivity

Researchers:
Location:
Bangladesh and India
Type:
  • Pilot project
Remote hiring and work has the potential to expand the set of labor market opportunities across geographies, and disproportionately benefit workers traditionally underemployed in their local labor markets (such as those in remote areas, or those preferring...

Which design features of the Kenyan AJIRA Program have the most impact?

Researchers:
  • Japheth Awiti
Location:
Kenya
Type:
  • Project development grant
Labor market indicators for youth in Kenya are worse than those for individuals aged 25 to 64 years. For example, the unemployment rate amongst the Kenyan youth aged 15 to 24 years is 13% compared to 5.1% for those aged 25 to 64 years. Although aggregate labor...

2021

Supported Childcare and Female Labor Market Participation in East Africa

Researchers:
  • Nicholas Kilimani
  • Kizito Omala
  • John Sseruyange
Location:
Uganda
Type:
  • Project development grant
Evidence on the impact of childcare in limiting female labor market participation in the East African region is still scanty and limited to single case studies. In this project, we propose to investigate the extent of the constraints imposed by childcare...

Can Speed Dating Initiatives Lead to Better Employment Opportunities in Malawi?

Researchers:
  • Daniel Chiumia
  • Sera Gondwe
  • Robertson Khataza
Location:
Malawi
Type:
  • Project development grant
Youth unemployment is a pervasive global problem. In Malawi, one third of unemployed youth remain jobless for more than 2 years. The most important youth employment barriers include information frictions and limited job-search abilities among young people...

Start-Up Skills Training for the Youth. Evidence from an Experiment in Ghana

Researchers:
  • Joshua Abor
  • Edward Asiedu
  • Agyapomaa Gyeke-Dako
  • Peter Quartey
  • Festus Ebo Turkson
Location:
Ghana
Type:
  • Pilot project
The strong performance of Ghana's economy over the last two decades has not resulted in job creation and improvements in employment conditions, especially among youth. Among the factors that influence unemployment in Ghana, inadequate access to education...

Employers' Biases and Women Job Search

Researchers:
  • Louise Paul-Delvaux
Location:
Morocco
Type:
  • Project development grant
The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region is characterized by historically low female labor force participation. Morocco is among the few countries that have recorded a sustained drop, from 26.3 percent in 2004 to 22 percent in 2019. Even conditional on...

Why Don’t Small Firms Merge?

Researchers:
Location:
Ghana
Type:
  • Pilot project
In this project, we intend to leverage a sample of the universe of all garment-making firm owners in a single district capital in Ghana, to ask a seemingly naïve question: Why don't small firms merge? Our research team has conducted data collection with this...

Urban Under-Exploration

Researchers:
Location:
Kenya
Type:
  • Full project
Despite living in high-density cities, job seekers with low-incomes might only be familiar with a small number of urban locations. We show that underemployed casual workers in Kibera, Nairobi only search for work in a small subset among all nearby locations...

Impact of Quality Childcare Services on Women’s Empowerment in Senegal

Researchers:
  • Fatou Cissé
  • Abdoulaye Diagne
Location:
Dakar
Type:
  • Project development grant
Women's participation in the labor market has declined between 2008 and 2018, with a higher proportional drop in West Africa due to several factors, including the burden of unpaid childcare (IDRC, 2020). Childcare services, one of the policy levers that could...

Digital Market Linkages - Going Global with Home-Based Work

Researchers:
  • Ali Cheema
  • Ibrahim Khan
  • Mahnoor Khan
  • Farooq Naseer
  • Jacob Shapiro
Location:
Pakistan
Type:
  • Pilot project
Can connecting women in rural areas to urban markets through digital finance and e-commerce create and sustain market linkages? Can it improve women’s socio-economic outcomes? We will pilot an intervention that employs digital connectivity to overcome spatial...

Pilot: Planning for Productive Migration in Niger

Researchers:
  • Darin Christensen
  • Allison Grossman
  • Guy Grossman
  • Jeremy Weinstein
Location:
Niger
Type:
  • Pilot project
Development programming typically seeks to promote “development-in-place” and minimize migration – bringing investment and jobs to people, rather than facilitating mobility. This approach overlooks pull factors that draw individuals out of rural areas and push...

Hidden Work: Social Image and Entrepreneurship Failures

Researchers:
Location:
Côte d’Ivoire
Type:
  • Project development grant
Through their networks, entrepreneurs in low- to middle-income countries have the opportunity to access valuable financial and informational resources. Many entrepreneurs appear to forego those benefits and prefer to hide their economic activities from their...

2020

Promoting regular labor supply among the urban poor

Researchers:
Type:
  • Pilot project
Low and irregular labor force participation, high labor turnover and absenteeism are major impediments to productivity in poor countries. We hypothesize that workers have difficulty providing regular labor supply in the formal sector because they lack the...

The Effects of Microenterprise Location Choice

Researchers:
Location:
Kampala, Uganda
Type:
  • Project development grant
This project addresses the business location choice of physically mobile, low capital microentrepreneurs, such as street vendors and motorcycle taxi drivers, in Kampala, Uganda. More than 50 percent of Kampala’s businesses are microfirms and their owners are...

An Evaluation of Ghana’s National Service Scheme

Researchers:
Location:
Ghana
Type:
  • Project development grant
National cohesion and labor productivity are two central issues in sub-Saharan Africa. Ghana’s National Service Scheme (NSS) is an ambitious government program intended to address both, while also providing the labor required for completing national...

Kinship Pressure and Firm-Worker Matching Distortions

Researchers:
Location:
Zambia
Type:
  • Project development grant
When businesses hire employees, “the vast majority of microenterprises have no employees outside the owner’s family”.Most economists understand the propensity to hire relatives as arising from contracting frictions and missing information markets...

Memory, Information, and Labor Supply

Researchers:
Location:
Burundi
Type:
  • Project development grant
As youth in low-income countries move towards urban areas in search of off-farm jobs, they often enter the urban informal labor markets (Beegle and Bundervoet, 2019), either as self-employed or as waged daily laborers. Waged casual jobs are typically short and...

Small Enterprise Emergency Financial Assistance (SEEFA) Baseline Top-Up

Researchers:
  • Morgan Hardy
  • Jamie McCasland
Location:
Ghana
Type:
  • Other
We are asking for top-up funding for an existing (J-PAL JOI and PEDL funded) experiment that randomizes emergency job retention financial assistance to firms and workers to estimate impacts for firm survival, worker-firm match survival, and labor market...

Supporting Female Entrepreneurs During a Pandemic

Researchers:
  • Edward Asiedu
  • Monica Lambon-Quayefio
  • Francesca Truffa
  • Ashley Wong
Location:
Ghana
Type:
  • Pilot project
This research implements a field experiment in Ghana to identify potential policies that can support the growth of female-owned small and medium enterprises (SMEs). We investigate the effects of an exogenous expansion of female professional networks and...

Small Enterprise Emergency Financial Assistance (SEEFA)

Researchers:
  • Morgan Hardy
  • Jamie McCasland
Location:
Ghana
Type:
  • Full project
While a majority of workers in low-income countries are own-account, a sizable share are wage employed in informal firms. Does the logic of firm assistance and job retention programs in the formal sector apply to firms and wage employees in the informal sector...

The Effects of the Lockdown on Temporary Migrants in India

Researchers:
Location:
Chennai, India
Type:
  • Pilot project
This study aims to assess the short- and medium-term impact of Covid-19 on a particularly vulnerable and large but difficult to reach population in India: temporary migrants. Building on a sample of urban migrants from a previous study, we will conduct phone...

Learning to See a World of Opportunities

Researchers:
Location:
Bogotá, Colombia
Type:
  • Other
Nationwide lockdowns and social distancing strategies in response to COVID-19 threaten the daily operations of small businesses, undermining a critical--and often only--source of daily income for vulnerable populations. Sudden economic hardship, psychosocial...

Is Heading Home a Dead End? COVID-Induced Migration and Local Labor Market Opportunities in Rural India

Researchers:
Location:
Bihar, India
Type:
  • Pilot project
With over 200,000 migrants returning to Bihar in the wake of COVID-19 outbreak and a nationwide shutdown, our project works with the Government of Bihar's COVID-19 Response Team to support a rapid policy response. Specifically, we will be conducting high...

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