Abstract
Entrepreneurship is a promising opportunity for women in Mozambique, but female entrepreneurs in the country continue to face many constraints and are concentrated in small-scale, low-growth, informal businesses in services sectors – similar to many other low- or middle-income countries. A World Bank funded project – Harnessing the Demographic Dividend (HDD, P166100) – is launching a nation-wide Business Plan Competition in Mozambique with the explicit aim of attracting and supporting female-owned high-growth businesses. The winners of the BPC in Mozambique will receive grants, training and mentoring, and access to an internship program. The project specifies that 50 % of all BPC winners must be female, thereby instituting a gender quota. Previous experiences in several African have shown that women are underrepresented among the applicants and winners of BPCs, even though their returns from winning these competitions are at least as large as men’s.
Given this difficulty of attracting female applicants to BPCs, the research team, in collaboration with the HDD project team, will conduct a randomized controlled trial (RCT) to test different interventions that aim to increase the participants’ likelihood of applying to the BPC and the performance of their businesses within and outside the BPC. Tested against 0) no intervention and 1) a factual control intervention, three different interventions will be employed which aim to mitigate different possible constraints to successful participation in the BPC: 2) a quota intervention that makes the gender quota in the BPC salient and aims to alleviate the constraint that women are less likely to enter competitions against men, and are less competitive when facing male competitors; 3) an inspirational intervention presenting same-gendered role models that aims to boost participant’s aspirations and confidence to enter the competition; and 4) application assistance that aims to reduce the costs of applying and address practical constraints to participation.