ing. Nevertheless, as an emerging technology in a developing country setting, we were still unsure how feasible live Zoom training sessions would be.

IPA Mexico monitored 75 training sessions to observe how frequently technology issues occurred. 3 of the sessions had to be rescheduled due to electricity cuts or a hurricane, but otherwise technical issues involving computers, cameras, and microphones were not a major issue. There were occasional connectivity issues due to slow connection networks or to entrepreneurs’ data plans finishing, but these connections were usually reestablished within a few minutes. Participants typically used their mobile phones to join the Zoom sessions. Instructors used the chat and microphone features to get some questions and feedback from participants: in the average monitored session just over 80 percent of participants typed something in the chat, and approximately half turned on their video briefly (they kept it off most of the time to conserve data).

Take-up and attendance were then much higher than has been the case in most voluntary asynchronous courses. 80.7 percent of those assigned to treatment attended at least one session, with a mean of 5.5 sessions attended and 61.4 percent completing the course. This is in line with the average take-up rate for in-person training classes of 65 percent (McKenzie and Woodruff, 2014) and higher than Iacovone et al. (2018) find for CREA’s in-person training, where 69% started the course and 45% completed it. Figure A2 shows attendance rates by session. They fall over the course, but not steeply, from 72% for the first session to 60% for the last session. In contrast, take-up from the control group for the asynchronous materials was low: only 11.3% completed the first module, and only 6.6% completed all 4 modules.

# **3.2 How Much Cost-Saving is there from Zoom Training?**

One motive for considering business training by Zoom is the potential to lower costs. We worked with CREA to collect cost data on provision of training and to compare it to their cost structure when offering in-person training. The estimated cost per participant in Zoom training was $50 in Mexico and $56 in Guatemala. This covers the cost of personnel for recruitment and training, technology costs such as Zoom license fees, data plans, paid Facebook advertising, and other recruitment costs. The costs of personnel, especially the trainer, are the main cost. While in principle these personnel costs could be lower than in person if the online trainers were able to teach more women at the same time, in practice the difficulty of recruiting large numbers of women who all wanted to start and attend sessions at the same time meant that class sizes were similar to an in-person class. As a result, the estimated cost of an in-person class is not that much higher: $62 in Mexico. In-person classes involve some costs for trainer transport and venue rental, and fewer technology costs, but even with in-person training the personnel costs are 79% of total cost. However, this is based on having microentrepreneurs show up in-person at places where CREA already operates. In contrast, if we were to take the geographic spread across all states of Mexico and also in Guatemala, it would be much more expensive for CREA to travel and set up new trainings in all of these locations.

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