A lack of access to finance can impede the potential for growth among small firms. To meet this finance gap and to encourage high-growth entrepreneurship, governments and multilateral agencies throughout the developing world often directly fund small and medium enterprises. Governments, however, have little guidance when it comes to choosing the firms with growth potential, and making sure that limited funds are targeted where they will spur the most growth. In Mexico, researchers are evaluating the impact of providing government funding to small enterprises, and whether different types of selection panels are more effective at selecting firms with high growth potential.

In Senegal, researchers conducted a randomized evaluation to study the effect of providing management advice and a one-time cash transfer on agricultural productivity and farmers’ investment in their businesses. Receiving both the cash transfer and management advice had positive impacts on yields and livestock as well as farmers’ investment in agricultural equipment, while receiving management advice only did not impact agricultural investments.

To study the employment limitation of microenterprises, researchers offered microentrepreneurs capital to incentivize them to hire workers. Results showed that a wage subsidy did not lead to lasting increases in employment sales or profits.

Researchers are partnering with a bank and a mobile money operator in the Dominican Republic to evaluate the impact of credit scoring models designed specifically for women on access to credit.

Researchers conducted a randomized evaluation in Mali to study the role of giving information to different people within a network in the spread of that information. People who were social and more closely connected to those who were trained had more information. Female farmers were less likely to receive information, indicating that disseminating information through social networks may reinforce existing gender inequalities.

Researchers evaluated the impact of Chile’s national Skills For Life (SFL) program for disruptive students on their behavior and academic outcomes. Researchers found that the SFL program did not impact eligible students’ learning outcomes.

Researchers partnered with an employer in Addis Ababa to assess the impact of a small monetary incentive to apply for a job or a higher wage offer on the quality of applicants to a vacancy for a clerical position. Both of these changes increased the quality of applicants by similar amounts.

Researchers at the Lujeri Tea Estates in Malawi evaluated the impact of exposure to more, less, or equally productive peers on tea harvester productivity. They found that increasing the productivity of a worker’s peers meaningfully increased worker productivity, measured in kilograms of tea picked. This result was driven largely by women, whose productivity gains were much larger than those of men.

In this randomized evaluation in Zimbabwe, researchers studied how social media messages targeting misinformation can affect people’s beliefs about and responses toward Covid-19. The study found that these messages increased participants’ knowledge of Covid-19 information by 7 percentage points and reduced potentially harmful behavior, or noncompliance with lockdown guidelines, by 30 percentage points.

Researchers evaluated the impact of direct mail and phone calls on the turnout of Black voters in ten different states. Neither mailings nor phone calls significantly impacted voter turnout, perhaps due to the large volume of political messaging that voters had to navigate.