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Personal Initiative Training Leads to Remarkable Growth of Women-Owned Small Businesses in Togo
No full textStandard business training programs aim to boost the incomes of the millions of self-employed business owners in developing countries, by teaching accounting, marketing and other basic business skills. However, research shows limited impacts of this traditional business training approach. Through an experiment in Togo, we introduced the personal initiative training program, a new and effective psychology-based entrepreneurship training that outperforms traditional business training. The personal initiative training increased firm profits in Togo by 30 percent relative to a control group, compared to no significant impacts from a traditional business training. Personal initiative training led to more than just a boost in profits for micro entrepreneurs. After the training business owners were more innovative, introduced new products, borrowed more and made larger investments. The personal initiative training was particularly effective for female entrepreneurs, for whom traditional training has often been in effective. Women who received personal initiative training saw their profits increase by 40 percent, compared to 5 percent for traditional business. This study’s findings make a strong case for the role of psychology in better influencing how small business training programs are taught in West Africa and beyond. It shows the importance of developing an entrepreneurial mindset in addition to learning the business practices of successful entrepreneurs. Based on these promising results, the personal initiative training is being implemented in programs in Mozambique, Mauritania, Ethiopia, Jamaica, and Mexico
Opportunity versus necessity: understanding the heterogeneity of female micro-entrepreneurs
No full textEntrepreneurs that voluntarily choose to start a business because they are able to identify a good business opportunity and act on it -- opportunity entrepreneurs -- might be different along various dimensions from those who are forced to become entrepreneurs because of lack of other alternatives -- necessity entrepreneurs. To provide evidence on these differences, this paper exploits a unique data set covering a wide array of characteristics, including cognitive skills, non-cognitive skills and managerial practices, for a large sample of female entrepreneurs in Mexico. Descriptive results show that on average opportunity entrepreneurs have better performance and higher skills than necessity entrepreneurs. A discriminant analysis reveals that discrimination is difficult to achieve based on these observables, which suggests the existence of unobservables driving both the decision to become an opportunity entrepreneur and performance. Thus, an instrumental variables estimation is conducted, using state economic growth in the year the business was set up as an instrument for opportunity, to confirm that opportunity entrepreneurs have higher performance and better management practices
On the Future of the Public Policy School
No full textInitially created as schools of public administration to help consolidate and advance the functioning of the expanding nation state, these institutions evolved into public policy or governance schools over time. As they evolved, they encountered many tensions inherent in a triad of “management and administration – policy analysis and academia – policy making and politics”. Each of the triad corners represents a distinct and relatively powerful constituency: academia mostly interested in analytics; public administrators eager to optimise processes; and policy makers looking for actionable answers. For the most part, schools managed to negotiate the tensions inherent in the triad, but they now face a series of new challenges that will require them to change substantially to maintain their relevance. The article discusses the evolution of public policy schools, presents the reasons behind current challenges and offers several recommendations
Philanthropic Foundations in Comparative Perspectives: Assessments from Twelve Countries
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