# _Entrepreneurship_

The program had modest success in promoting entrepreneurship among youth (appendix A, table A2). The likelihood that participants became first‐time entrepreneurs, that is, operated their own businesses, including family businesses, for the first time, increased by 4.1 percentage points relative to nonparticipants (15.8 percent). The impacts were larger and statistically significant only among men, although the equality of effects by gender cannot be rejected. These findings are consistent with the self‐employment results and the fact that men in Sierra Leone engage less in nonfarm self‐employment as a primary job than women, allowing men more margin for entry into this area.

The program had a positive and significant impact on volatility, as proxied by the lowest monthly profits derived by household enterprises in the previous 12 months. Treatment increased profits in the worst month by 24.7 percent; indeed, several studies have emphasized that training programs may have the strongest influence on profits during bad months, thereby reducing profit volatility (McKenzie and Woodruff 2014). However, this result appears to be explained by a greater understanding of enterprise finances among participants because the program also raised the likelihood that financial records would be kept, and the improved recordkeeping seems to have influenced how profits were measured (see below). Following the approach used by de Mel, McKenzie, and Woodruff (2014), financial recordkeeping was included as a control in the treatment regression; this showed that financial recordkeeping was positively associated with profits and, once this control is included, the impact observed on profits loses its significance .

The program also shifted the types of businesses in which youth are engaged, resulting in a distribution that resembles more closely that of the general population. According to the latest nationally representative labor force survey, most household entrepreneurs in Sierra Leone are traders or shopkeepers (84.0 percent), compared with 75.4 percent of the youth in the control group. The program increased the probability of involvement in trading or shopkeeping businesses by 7.9 percentage points, which means that 83.2 percent of the household enterprises owned by youth were of this type (appendix A, table A2, column 5). However, this outcome is driven purely by women because no change among men was observed, and the effect is significantly different by gender. This aligns with the high concentration of women in self‐employment in the program’s absence, and the effect was thus expected to be seen in the profile of existing businesses. However, because it relies on conditional estimates, this result should be interpreted with caution; similar effects are not found in the unconditional estimates, possibly because of the large proportion of households not engaged in any household enterprise.<sup>17</sup> An examination of the impacts across treatment groups suggests that the entrepreneurship results are driven by treatment group B, which is consistent with the business skills content of this intervention package. The impacts by treatment are significantly larger among group B than among group C in terms of the likelihood of first‐time entrepreneurship and raising profits during bad months. This result suggests that the business skills training package was more effective than the full package at promoting entrepreneurship.

> 17 Based on balance tests, the conditional results show no evidence of differential selection bias. Thus, the restricted sample is balanced on observables across treatment groups.

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