# **2. What does a typical business training program involve?**

Attempts to measure “the” impact of “business training” face multiple challenges, which complicate comparisons across studies. The first challenge is that business training varies in what is offered and how it is offered across different locations and organizations. These differences in content are likely to be important and to induce much more heterogeneity into the treatment of business training than there is in several other firm interventions such as access to capital through credit or grants. A second challenge (common to most evaluations) is that the impact of training is likely to differ depending on who receives the training, so that even if we compare the same training content in different locations, differences in the characteristics of the individuals receiving the training may result in different measured impacts. In practice, studies vary both in how they select individuals to participate, and in what content they offer to those who are selected, It is therefore important to examine carefully who participates and what is offered before making comparisons among studies.

_Who takes part in business training experiments?_ Table 1 summarizes key characteristics of the participants in recent business training evaluation studies. The most common modality for training amongst these studies is for class-room based training to be offered by microfinance organizations or banks to their clients. This is particularly common for training offered to female microenterprise owners, given that the majority of microfinance clients are women. In some cases training is offered to all clients as part of their regular group meetings (e.g. Karlan and Valdivia, 2011, Berge et al, 2011) while in other cases the bank or microfinance organization offers training as an optional additional service for clients (e.g. Bruhn and Zia, 2012). A second strategy has been to offer training to firms in a particular industry or industrial cluster (e.g. Mano et al, 2011; Sonobe et al, 2011). A third strategy is to have individuals apply to take part in the training as part of a competition, as is done by Technoserve (Klinger and Schündeln, 2011), be screened on interest in participating (Valdivia, 2012), or to have students apply to take part in an entrepreneurship course (Premand et al, 2012). All of these approaches result in a selected sample of firms, who may differ from the general population. A final approach, to date used only by de Mel et al. (2012) and Calderon et al. (2012), is to draw a representative sample of the microenterprise population of interest and then offer the training to a random subsample of this population.

As a result of these approaches to selecting participants, most evaluations focus on existing businesses. Exceptions include studies where many of the microfinance clients are borrowing or saving for household purposes but do not necessarily have an enterprise (e.g. Field et al, 2010), and studies which are based on competitions or training of new businesses (Klinger and Schündeln, 2011; Premand et al, 2012; de Mel et al, 2012). It is noticeable that almost all the evaluations to date have focused on urban clients, which likely reflects the greater density of businesses and training providers in urban areas. Exceptions are Giné and Mansuri (2011) who work in rural Pakistan, half of the sample of Karlan and Valdivia (2012), which comes from rural Peru, and Calderon et al. (2012) who work in rural Mexico.

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