Building Women's Skills for Economic Inclusion and Resilience

Megan Elizabeth Lang and Julia Seither

No 10980, Policy Research Working Paper Series from The World Bank

Abstract: Can skills-based programs promote women’s economic inclusion? This study randomizes access to a program teaching entrepreneurship skills in rural Uganda. The program covers record-keeping, identifying business opportunities, raising capital, and soft skills like perseverance and confidence, but it provides no access to cash or capital. Treated women are 17 percent more likely to generate income from their own businesses 18 months post-program. They heavily re-invest in their businesses. High-frequency data show that treated women also fare significantly better during the COVID-19 lockdown than women in the control group. Exploiting social network data, this paper detects positive network-based spillovers to the control group and provides novel tools to adjust estimates accordingly. Although the program is not transformative, the results indicate an important role for skills-based programming in efforts for economic inclusion among rural, low-income women.

Date: 2024-11-19
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ent
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/0995544 ... e7b-3b003d1e77c6.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wbk:wbrwps:10980

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Policy Research Working Paper Series from The World Bank 1818 H Street, N.W., Washington, DC 20433. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Roula I. Yazigi ().