representative sample of Mexican female entrepreneurs taken from the 2023 ENOE, and to a sample of CREA’s in-person clients from Iacovone et al. (2018). Online recruitment was successful in scaling across a wide geographic range. The businesses are based in all 32 states of Mexico, with only 28% coming from Mexico City and the neighboring State of Mexico. 8% of the women are in Guatemala. The businesses are small in size, with only 59% having any employees, and an average of 1.5 employees, and average monthly profits of approximately 2,000 pesos ($100). Firms were required to be in operation for at least a year to join the program, and the average years of operation is 4 years. Firms cover a heterogeneous mix of industries, but the majority involve women making and selling some sort of product, while 30 percent are in services. The most common sectors are baked and prepared food, beauty, handicrafts, and clothes and accessories. The women running these businesses average 40 in age, and 48 percent have some university education. At baseline there was plenty of scope to improve their business practices: while 65% said they kept written accounts, they were only doing 38 percent of the marketing practices, 27 percent of the accounting practices, and 17 percent of the planning practices that the training was intended to cover.

We see that the women who are recruited for Zoom training are on average younger and more educated than the average Mexican female entrepreneur, and more likely to have an employee in their firm. They are more similar to the typical in-person clients of CREA in age, but also more educated. In-person clients tend to be concentrated in a few states, whereas online recruitment gives a sample more geographically representative. Household income levels are similar to those of the average microentrepreneur and profits and sales are substantially lower than for in-person clients, although this could reflect the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on demand.

# **2.2 Random Assignment and Training Content**

Firms were stratified by recruitment wave, country, terciles of baseline sales, and terciles of baseline business practices and then randomized into a control group of 695 businesses, and two training treatment groups of 1513 businesses.

The two treatment groups varied in how the content of their training was determined. The first, which we call ‘top-down’, is the more standard structure, where the training organization (CREA) determined which topics should be taught. Trainers covered four modules that covered resilience and self-determination (drawing on aspects of personal initiative training); costs, prices, and finances; marketing and e-commerce; and the business Canvas tool and business model for planning. The second approach, which we call ‘bottom-up’, had participants collectively meet in their first class and help determine which topics they were most interested in being covered. In practice, there was large overlap between the topics and material in the two treatments, perhaps in part due to the advertising for the program emphasizing certain topics. Appendix A provides more details on the content and overlap of the two types, and shows we cannot reject equality of treatment effects across these two groups. Given the similarity of topics and effect, we therefore pool the two into a single treatment group for our main analysis.

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