proposed innovations in their enterprise.<sup>3</sup> Annex 2 provides a visual representation of the various components of the intervention.

The intervention was only delivered to women, with the specific goal of enhancing their skills and helping them overcome some of the gender-specific obstacles they face. The design of the intervention recognized that women entrepreneurs juggle several commitments and as a result face significant time and mobility constraints. Very often, they run their businesses out of their homes. Moreover, in part because of their lower education achievement, women tend to have had fewer opportunities than men to acquire relevant skills. To address these constraints, classes were run only during times and for durations that were more convenient for women, and were organized in locations and around transport options accessible to women, who were compensated for the travel expenses. The classes with dense technical content were repeated for the benefit of women with lower literacy skills. In recognition that women often run more than one business, the program helped women to identify and direct their energy to the most promising one.

AIDOS supported a local NGO, the Tanzania Gatsby Trust (TGT) in designing and implementing the various components of both the basic and the enhanced training. Prior to designing the two versions of the training program, AIDOS and TGT conducted market research in order to identify sectors with stronger growth potential to better target the recruitment of training participants. The entrepreneurs who enrolled in the training programs were selected from those who had businesses in the following sectors: food or soap processing, trade, food retail, animal husbandry, handicraft or light manufacturing, textile and tailoring and services including beauty services, venue decoration or child care (Table 1 presents the distribution of the entrepreneurs in our sample by sectors).

In order to be eligible for participation in the training, applicants had to be at least 18 years old, literate, and have an established<sup>4</sup> business in one of the targeted sectors. Unlike other similar experiments (such as Berge et al., 2014; Giné and Mansuri, 2011), the women recruited for the intervention did not need to be microfinance clients, although many were and several had access to bank financing (see the discussion below on the recruitment strategy). At the time of their selection, the mean revenue generated by the participants’ main businesses was 440 dollars per

> 3 As the enhanced version of the training consisted in providing customized, individualized support, by definition this intervention differed across entrepreneurs. This is in contrast with the basic training that was delivered in exactly the same way to all participants (although different trainers may have delivered it slightly differently, based on their skills and personality, to different classes). What is interesting in the enhanced version of the training is that the intervention (its intensity and quality) depended also on the coaches’ perception of the skills of the entrepreneur and her potential to succeed. It was also different depending on the sector and type of activity (for example, PD&D was more relevant for textile than poultry farming). This degree of heterogeneity in the treatment itself was part of the design, that is, the enhanced version of the training was about delivering training that was to some extent customized in order to meet the needs and characteristics of the entrepreneur.

> 4 For screening purposes, the definition of ‘established’ was that the business had to have been operating for at least a year. Survey data indicate that the majority, but not all, of the businesses in the treatment and control groups met this criterion.

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