Agyei-Holmes et al., 2020; Bakhtiar et al., 2022).<sup>5</sup> Impacts on primary outcomes are summarized in Appendix Tables A2 and A3.

# **3.1 Datasets and Experiment Designs**

## **3.1.1 Interventions for Entrepreneurs**

The impact evaluations of business skills trainings for entrepreneurs included in our dataset took place in Ethiopia and Togo. All three trainings had sizeable impacts on entrepreneurs’ profits.

The first Ethiopia IE was an RCT of a mindset-oriented business training offered by the NGO Digital Opportunity Trust (henceforth ‘Ethiopia DOT’). The training was underpinned by psychological insights and aimed to foster self-esteem and entrepreneurial spirit among female small- and micro-entrepreneurs in urban Mekelle, Ethiopia. The training, delivered by young university graduates in ICT, focused on applying this mindset-oriented approach to business planning, market assessment and testing. The intervention entailed 30 hours of training, offered in half-day sessions over a period of 20 days. The IE—which randomized 400 women into treatment from a sampling frame of 800<sup>6</sup> —showed a 30% increase in female firm profits as a result of the training (Alibhai et al., 2019). We use data collected at baseline in October 2014, at first follow-up in March 2016 and at second follow-up in March 2017.

The second Ethiopia IE was also an RCT, this time of the Women Agribusiness Leaders Network (henceforth ‘Ethiopia WALN’). The program operated in the World Bank’s Agricultural Growth Program’s target woredas across five regions in Ethiopia: Tigray, Amhara, Oromia, Addis Ababa and SNNPR. The sample is urban. The program identified and provided interventions to both mentors and mentees. The IE analyzed impacts on both groups and found that the training increased business profits and sales by 0.21 standard deviations for mentors, but mentees’ profits did not significantly increase (Bakhtiar et al., 2022). Consequently, our analysis includes only the mentors. As part of WALN, mentors were provided with business planning and management support, leadership support by ‘role models’ (international business specialists and leaders) and mentoring skills. The training was provided for two days a month for six months. To participate in WALN as a mentor, female business owners had to have at least one employee and had to be able to nominate at least six mentees they could train. The training was free for the mentors on the condition that they “paid-it-forward" by mentoring the mentees. The IE randomly assigned half of the eligible 200 mentors to receive the intervention. For this study, we use the baseline data collected in March 2014, the first follow-up data collected in July 2015, and the endline data collected in January 2018.

Lastly, the IE in Lomé, Togo was an RCT of a psychology-based personal initiative training, which emphasized achieving a proactive mindset and focused on entrepreneurial behaviors (henceforth ‘Togo PI’). To be eligible, entrepreneurs had to have been in business for at

> 5Effects on intermediate non-agency outcomes targeted directly by the interventions were detected, but these are specific to each program (e.g., entrepreneurial orientation and grit increased as a result of business skills training and can act as a mechanism in those impact evaluations, but are not affected in the land interventions and thus cannot explain their treatment impacts).

> 6The sampling frame was obtained through the World Bank’s WEDP program, which provides loans and entrepreneurship training to growth-oriented female entrepreneurs in Ethiopia.

10