Abstract
Rural youth unemployment is one of the prime development challenges in Ethiopia. Increased participation of youth in agribusiness such as beekeeping could be the key to creating employment for the youth, alleviating poverty, and sustaining socio-political stability. It is common for government and development partners to organize youth in groups, provide common working areas and technical support and follow up so that they start viable income-generating enterprises. However, despite the efforts, the success and sustainability of group enterprises are low due to conflicts that emanate mainly from unequal effort contribution by the group members. Some group members do not contribute equal efforts to the group work because they share the product and income equally. To support successful group enterprise development, a search for cost-effective incentive mechanisms to encourage youth to contribute optimal effort in group enterprises is needed. In this experiment, we will evaluate alternative interventions that could address the free-riding problem the youth groups face. The interventions are organizing tournaments and nudging with letters. We will evaluate the effectiveness of these interventions using a cluster randomized controlled trials (RCT) design. The cluster RCT design will help us compare alternative cost-effective mechanisms for improving youth group effort and enterprise-level outcomes such as income and productivity. To run the RCT, we will leverage an existing program called More Young Entrepreneurs in Silk and Honey in Ethiopia. We will collect baseline, follow up and final data from 4 treatment arms: control, individual enterprise, tournament incentive, and nudging with text messages and letters. From each arm, an equal sample size of 475 enterprises will be selected randomly and interviewed on enterprise performance indicators such as production, productivity, apiary site management, time spent on the apiary site, bee colony size, and other covariates that include enterprise-level and member characteristics. The primary outcome variable is honey yield (kg/hive) and total income from honey production and related businesses and the secondary outcome variables are number of frame beehives with bee colonies, absconding rate, hours worked on the apiary sites, and youth dropout rate. The data will be analyzed using multiple linear regression for evaluating the impact of the treatments and other covariates on the primary and secondary outcome variables.