Youth and rural women entrepreneurship: Creating and sustaining alternative livelihood options in Ghana

Our intervention focuses on the collaborative creation of agricultural enterprises between graduates and rural women entrepreneurs. Our model leverages the business contest organized by the Association of Ghana (AGI) Industries to create an entrepreneurship hub at the University of Ghana's Nutrition Research and Training Centre (NRTC), which will serve as a location for capacity building, creativity, innovation, and business incubation for the jointly created start-ups of graduates and rural women entrepreneurs. Uniquely, our intervention uses a bottom-up approach that will identify the needs of rural women entrepreneurs and inform the themes that AGI uses for the national business contest for sustainability. In so doing, we expect rural women and graduates to benefit from other national opportunities, such as that presented by AGI, through the collaborative creation of agricultural enterprises.

2023-03-15

2024-02-29

This intervention will:
• Lead to the co-creation of agricultural enterprises to support the livelihoods of both rural women and graduates
• Contribute to curbing youth unemployment in Ghana
• Provide insights into how rural women and graduates can partner to create sustainable businesses through the process evaluation component of this study
• Provide population-based themes that allow limited resources to be allocated to start-ups that directly address the needs of entrepreneurs and highlight the need for collaboration among youth and women—two demographic groups whose full potential has not been fully exploited—to solve unemployment and insufficient entrepreneurship skills issues
• Understand the concept and drivers of the engagement level of rural women through surveys at the mid-point and endline of this project. The level of engagement of rural women entrepreneurs (i.e., the intensity of their participation in this project) is an indicator of their motivation and a proxy for the quality of the project. Understanding how engagement is defined by women and what its drivers are could better elucidate the pathways leading to impact and improve it in future projects

1. Needs and collaboration opportunity assessment
Qualitative data about rural women entrepreneurs' training needs and opportunities for collaboration will be collected through focus group discussions to develop themes to guide the national business contest. In total, 2 - 3 focus group discussions will be carried out among women with more than 1 year of business experience, with each focus group comprising 7 - 10 rural women. A brief demographic survey will also be used to collect minimal information (e.g., age, education) about the participants.
2. 5-module entrepreneurship capacity-building training program for rural women
The data collected in the needs and collaboration opportunity assessment will be used to fine-tune existing training modules that AGI have previously developed for rural women that best suit their entrepreneurship needs. The women will be split into 2 groups of 50 each and trained as a group. Two to three focus group discussions will be held among 7 – 10 women/groups who received the training and did not participate in the first set of FGD, using a post-training interview guide to provide feedback on the training.
3. 5-module entrepreneurship capacity-building training for graduates
Thirty graduates will receive a 5-module entrepreneurship training, which will be delivered virtually via Zoom Video Conferencing over 2 days. The duration for delivering each topic would be approximately 2 hours. A feedback survey (provided through Microsoft Forms) soliciting qualitative and quantitative data will be collected based on a post-training interview guide and administered to the graduates after completing the training.
4. Process evaluation of the project by both rural women and graduates during the business proposal development phase
Qualitative data about the processes adopted in this project will be collected through in-depth interviews. Before the business contest, five - ten rural women and ten graduates will be purposively selected for in-depth interviews from the rural women–graduate groups.
6. Assessment of participation and beliefs about factors affecting business during the business proposal development phase
During the 3 months graduate-rural women interaction period (business proposal development), qualitative data will be collected to understand how women perceive engagement levels and what determines their level of engagement, including health/nutrition. Quantitative survey data will be collected to test an engagement level measurement tool.
7. Follow up and monitoring for 3 selected viable businesses
After the business contest, qualitative data will be collected from the 3 selected business participants (one rural woman and one graduate per business).

The randomization will be done in the office by a computer.

We will randomly select 100 women from a group of 300 women in the cassava value chain in the Sekesua Community.

No

1. Needs and collaboration opportunity assessment
One hundred rural women will be recruited for the project. Out of which, 2 – 3 groups of 7- 10 women will be selected for the focus group discussions to develop themes to guide the national business contest based on available resources and human resources support. Women with more than 1 year of experience will be included.
2. 5-module entrepreneurship capacity building training program for rural women
One hundred rural women will be recruited for the project and participate in the capacity-building training. Two to three focus group discussions will be held among 7 – 10 women/groups who received the training and did not participate in the first set of FGD, using the post-training interview guide (Appendix VI) to provide feedback on the training.
3. 5-module entrepreneurship training for graduates
Thirty graduates will be selected to receive a 5-module entrepreneurship training and complete a feedback survey virtually in the project. Based on the experience of our partner AGI, previous calls for expression of interest usually generate an average of 30 trainees. The 30 graduates will be asked to complete a survey once; the survey will take approximately 30 minutes. The graduates will complete the feedback survey virtually via the Microsoft Forms platform. This would give us a wide yet manageable pool of participants from which to select those who will continue in the subsequent stages of our project. We will develop rigorous selection criteria based on the outcomes of the collaboration opportunity assessment to select these graduates.
4. Process evaluation of the project by both rural women and graduates
One hundred rural women and 30 graduates will be recruited for the project. Out of which, 5 - 10 rural women and 10 graduates will be purposively selected based on their ability to self-form rural women–graduate groups for in-depth interviews before the business contest. The 15 - 20 in-depth interviews will be enough to bring out the themes needed for the process evaluation.
5. Assessment of participation and beliefs about factors affecting business during the business proposal development phase
One hundred rural women will be recruited for the project. Out of which, 3 women groups with 7 to 10 women will be randomly selected to participate in a focus group discussion to understand how women perceive engagement levels and what determines their level of engagement as well as factors that influence their businesses. A survey interview guide will be developed from the outcomes of the focus group discussions at this stage and will be administered among the 100 women.
6. Follow up and monitoring for 3 selected viable businesses
Three viable businesses will be awarded during the business contest stage. A total of 2 representatives (a rural woman and a graduate) from each business (total = 6) will be randomly selected for an in-depth interview using case studies. The case study interview guide will be developed from the results of the process evaluation to the data.

Same as cluster.

100 women receiving the entrepreneurship training versus 200 women not receiving the entrepreneurship training.