Teacher Training and Entrepreneurship Education: Evidence from a Curriculum Reform in Rwanda

Intensive in-service teacher training on the secondary school entrepreneurship curriculum over two years. The training includes 10 days of teacher workshops spread throughout each year of the two year intervention, and a one-day administration workshop each year for two years. The training intensity is intended to go beyond standard one-time initial teacher trainings.

2016-05-01

2017-12-31

student outcomes:
income
employment
business creation
cognitive skills
non-cognitive skills

Cognitive skills: standardized test scores, grades, endline tests of entrepreneurship knowledge
Non-cognitive skills: self-efficacy, creativity

Treatment: schools will be randomly selected to receive intensive in-service teacher training on the entrepreneurship curriculum over two years. The training includes 10 days of teacher workshops spread throughout each year of the two year intervention, and a one-day administration workshop each year for two years.

Control: A second set of schools will participate in the new entrepreneurship curriculum without intensive training in the entrepreneurship curriculum. Most teachers in control schools will not receive any in-service training. A subset (about 15%) of teachers in control schools will participate in a 5-day general orientation on changes in the broader curriculum.

Randomization of schools in office by computer random number generator

school

Yes

200 schools

3,000 students

treatment: 100 schools
control: 100 schools

MDE for outcomes measured in standard deviations (test size 5%, power 80%, intra-cluster correlation=0.2): 0.2 s.d. MDE for outcomes measured in proportions (test size 5%, power 80%, intra-cluster correlation=0.2): 0.1 (10 percentage points)

Pre-analysis plan, July 2016

2019 Tracer survey analysis plan, June 2020

Pre-analysis plan, July 2018

2021 Tracer analysis plan, March 2022

We assess, via a field experiment, how a comprehensive teacher training program affects the delivery of a major entrepreneurship curriculum reform in Rwanda. The reform introduced interactive pedagogy and a focus on business skills in the country’s required upper secondary entrepreneurship course. We randomly split a sample of 207 schools into treatment and control. Both groups received the government’s standard training. In addition, the treatment group was assigned intensive training organized by an NGO for two years. The training consisted of (i) six training sessions during school breaks, ii) exchange visits each term where teachers provided feedback to their peers, and (iii) outreach and support from NGO staff at least twice per year. The control group received only the default government training, which was not specific to entrepreneurship and lacked each of these elements. The program increased teachers’ use of active instruction, consistent with the reform’s features. These effects on pedagogy did not translate into improvements in student academic outcomes or skills. While still in secondary school, treated students increased participation in their own businesses by 5 percentage points, or 17% of the control mean. Wage employment (at others’ firms) declined by a commensurate amount in response to treatment, leaving no effect on overall income. These results suggest substitution between entrepreneurship and employment among students in treated schools.

Moussa P. Blimpo, Todd Pugatch, Entrepreneurship education and teacher training in Rwanda, Journal of Development Economics, Volume 149, 2021, 102583, ISSN 0304-3878, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jdeveco.2020.102583.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jdeveco.2020.102583

The persistently high employment share of the informal sector makes entrepreneurship a necessity for youth in many developing countries. We exploit exogenous variation in the implementation of Rwanda's entrepreneurship education reform in secondary schools to evaluate its effect on student economic outcomes up to three years after graduation. Using a randomized controlled trial, we evaluated a three-year intensive training for entrepreneurship teachers, finding pedagogical changes as intended and increased entrepreneurial activity among students. In this paper, we tracked students following graduation and found that increased entrepreneurship persisted one year later, in 2019. Students from treated schools were six percentage points more likely to be entrepreneurs, an increase of 19 percent over the control mean. However, gains in entrepreneurship faded after three years, in 2021. Employment was six percentage points lower in the treatment group. By some measures, income and profits were lower in the treatment group, with no robust differences in these outcomes overall. Lower incomes and profits were concentrated among marginal students induced into entrepreneurship by the program. Youth entrepreneurship programs may therefore steer some participants away from their comparative advantage. Nonetheless, the program increased university enrollment, suggesting the potential for higher long run returns.

Blimpo, Moussa and Blimpo, Moussa and Pugatch, Todd, Unintended Consequences of Youth Entrepreneurship Programs: Experimental Evidence from Rwanda. IZA Discussion Paper No. 16489, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4592983 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4592983

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4592983