Daily attendance among trainees was tracked and recorded by the instructors at the program VTCs using a monitoring form designed for all types of training. This was closely monitored by HELP‐SL data entry clerks and supervised by youth development officers of the National Youth Commission. To encourage training completion, follow‐up phone calls were made to trainees who attended irregularly.

The YESP faced a complicated and unexpected implementation challenge between March 2014 and June 2015, when more than 14,000 cases of Ebola virus disease were reported in Sierra Leone, and the disease took the lives of more than 3,900 people (WHO 2015). Four YESP beneficiaries died during program implementation. The Ebola crisis exerted an influence on the program through at least two channels: (i) labor supply and demand and (ii) productivity, although, because of the randomized design, these are not expected to have introduced any bias into the evaluation. First, Ebola had an impact on employment rates (Glennerster et al. 2015). Urban areas were particularly affected. In Freetown, the recorded decline in employment reached 9 percentage points at the height of the outbreak in November 2014. Youth were among those hardest hit (Fu et al. 2015; Glennerster et al. 2015). Relative to the previous year, self‐ employed individuals in nonfarm household enterprises also reported a 54 percent drop in revenues around the time the endline survey for this evaluation was collected (Glennerster et al. 2015). Evidence suggests these employment declines resulted primarily from a reduction in labor supply among people engaged in household enterprises. The Ebola crisis also weakened labor demand, evidenced by the declines in wage employment. Labor productivity was likewise affected because the government imposed movement restrictions and market closures and prohibited large gatherings, which limited the access of workers to their workplaces, clients, and markets.

During the implementation of the YESP, the economy suffered another negative shock aggravated by the Ebola crisis: falling prices for iron ore, the country’s main international export (World Bank and SSL 2016). This price decline affected the economy and the labor market by directly reducing employment in mines, cutting revenues among suppliers, and decreasing government income at a time when it was most needed to help recover from the Ebola virus disease emergency.

The Ebola crisis and the iron ore price shock influenced program implementation and thus had a potential impact on the program’s effectiveness. Because of worsening economic conditions, the effect of the program on employment and entrepreneurship may have been muted. Additionally, the benefits of practical training in situ were hindered because the restrictions imposed to reduce the spread of the disease led to the closure of some of the businesses where program participants had been placed for on‐ the‐job training. The Ebola outbreak also affected implementation by disrupting the microfinance facilitation aspect of the intervention. Because of the Ebola crisis, the default rate for prior borrowers rose dramatically, which strained HELP‐SL’s resources and led the organization to be more cautious in approving microfinance loans. In practice, few of the beneficiaries who were entitled to receive microfinance facilitation actually received loans (20 percent). The stipend provided during the program thus became the primary cash component of the intervention.

attendance would thus represent a monthly stipend of 36 percent and 22 percent of the median earnings at baseline for people in technical skills training and business skills training, respectively. The average exchange rate of the U.S. dollar to the Leone during implementation (December 2013–December 2014) is used here throughout.

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