Mentors or Teachers? Microenterprise Training in Kenya

By W. Brooks, Kevin F. Donovan, Terence R. Johnson. American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 2018

132 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We use a randomized controlled trial to demonstrate that inexperienced female microenterprise owners in a Kenyan slum benefit from mentorship by an experienced entrepreneur in the same community. Mentorship increases profits by 20 percent on average with initially large effects that fade as matches dissolve. We conduct a formal business education intervention, which has no effect on profits despite changes in business practice. Our results demonstrate that missing information is a salient barrier to profitability, but the type of information matters: access to the localized, specific knowledge of mentors increases profit while abstract, general information from the class does not. (JEL D83, J16, L25, L26, O14, O15)

Subfields: Business and International Management, Economics and Econometrics, Safety Research

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/59d662ac94e58c20ca2f233927daca1db29ac01e

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In Business and International Management

David J. McKenzie

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Citations in the corpus

Growing Markets through Business Training for Female Entrepreneurs: A Market-Level Randomized Experiment in Kenya (2017, background): “Brooks et al. (2016) find, also in Kenya, that assigning a mentor to a young firm 4 does increase profits in the short-run, but the effect fades over time.”