# **D.1 Handbook**

The content of the handbook was developed through primary qualitative and quantitative assessment of best practices among local business peers. First, prior to the start of quantitative fieldwork, we conducted detailed qualitative interviews with a sample of 102 shop owners chosen from two comparable urban markets outside our study area. The goal of these semi-structured interviews was to understand the most common and successful local business practices from the perspective of business owners, and to familiarize ourselves with the various implementation processes, norms, and constraints to adoption. To this end, we asked a number of open ended questions in the format of a conversation, and responses were recorded and later transcribed.

The analysis of these interviews allowed us to identify the following five categories of locally relevant business practices: record-keeping, financial planning, stocking-up, marketing, and joint decision-making. In the next stage, these categories directly fed into the quantitative baseline survey, from which we were able to associate the contribution of within-category individual practices to profits, sales, and number of customers. Specifically, for each category we estimated linear regressions of profits, sales, and number of customers on individual practices and a set of firm-level controls. The findings from these quantitative assessments were then matched with the qualitative fieldwork to arrive at the final set of locally relevant best practices to be included in the handbook.

With this information and the help of a local NGO, we developed a handbook of best practices used by peers. The handbook consists of five chapters: keeping business records, calculating profits, making stock-up decisions, attracting customers, and cooperation in business decisions, in this order. Although there is no chapter exclusively on financial planning, practices such as reviewing financial performance, analyzing where there are areas for improvement, and comparing sales with targets are natural consequences of implementing the best practices suggested in the handbook. Appendix Table A10 lists all the practices measured in this formative stage of the study, and Appendix Table A11 presents a summary of the information on beliefs, reasons to adopt practices, step-by-step implementation guidance, and tips presented in each of the five chapters of the handbook.<sup>14</sup> Each chapter is structured as follows. First, it confronts common false beliefs and misconceptions held by shop owners about the usefulness of implementing the different practices. These misconceptions are based on sentences that were heard repeatedly during the qualitative interviews. For example, one common thought by shop owners was that keeping records is hard for people without higher education, or that it is complicated. The handbook emphasizes that this is not the case, and that we have observed shop owners from different educational backgrounds keeping records. Likewise, to confront the belief that keeping records is complicated, the handbook provides simple step-by-step guidance on how to make record-keeping an easy routine to follow, also learned from peers.

Second, it presents arguments for why it is important to implement the practices, providing locally relevant evidence-based reasons. To this end, the handbook reports regression coefficients associating some of the practices with profits and sales using data from the quantitative baseline survey, and also provides an approximation to the monetary value of implementing each practice, both for a “typical” size shop and for “larger” shops. The following is an illustrative example: “From the survey we know that shops that use discounts to attract new and retain loyal customers have monthly sales that are 40% higher than the sales of shops which do not give discounts. Also, their

> 14The full handbook can be found here.

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