Government agents’ capacity and MSME performance

We administer two interventions to selected mentors who deliver weekly mentoring sessions to local MSMEs:

Intervention to improve mentoring delivery capacity.

This intervention will consist of the following elements: (i) two days of training in communication and organizational skills, and (ii) improved monitoring, in which a dedicated expert we hire regularly attends the meetings of these mentors, gives feedback about mentoring techniques, and is available for consultations.

Intervention about marketing practices.

This intervention will consist of the following elements: (i) two days of training about marketing and sales practices that are geared to the type of MSMEs in our sample. The training also covers the steps to obtain a halal certification, and (ii) monitoring specifically about marketing by dedicated experts who will provide additional feedback to mentors specifically about the marketing and halal certification process.

2024-05-29

2024-11-30

Firm performance, mentor practices, and mentee business practices.

Firm performance, including main outcomes such as revenue, profits, costs, as well as intermediate outcomes such as the number of clients, price, consumer evaluation by mystery shoppers, new product introduction, investments in tools, etc. These provide both headline measures of the effects of the treatment arms, and some evidence on the mechanisms.

Mentor practices. We will look at practices as measured by our enumerators in the meetings. Our focus is whether the enhanced delivery and enhanced content changed the number or the type of mentoring practices. We will also look at mentors’ satisfaction with the program and mentees’ satisfaction with the mentors.

Mentee business practices. These measure whether better mentor practices lead to the adoption of more mentee practices. Of particular interest are marketing-related practices, including online sales and obtaining a halal certificate.

We conduct training and monitoring to selected mentors who are responsible to train and mentor local MSMEs. We randomize mentees and mentors into the following nested treatment arms, which feature an increasing set of features:

C: Control (350 firms). These applicant firms meet the eligibility criteria but will not be accepted to the program.

T1: Mentoring program (~360 firms, 21 mentors). These firms are accepted and receive the program as designed by the government.

T2: Mentoring with enhanced capacity (~360 firms, 21 mentors). In addition to T1, for these firms we improve delivery capacity.

T3: Mentoring with enhanced capacity and content (~360 firms, 21 mentors). In addition to T2, we improve content.

To create the control group, in our first intervention we randomize acceptance to the program. We plan to pre-select a pool of about 2,000 applicants who meet the minimum requirements of our government partner. Out of these, we randomize about 1,450 to be accepted to the program, and about 350 to be denied acceptance due to space constraints. The latter constitute our pure control group. This randomization will be stratified at the level of the 11 subdistricts.

Not available

Randomisation done in office by a computer

We will randomize the acceptance into the program at the individual level, stratified at the level of subdistricts. We will randomize the treatment status at the mentor/village level.

Yes

63 mentors/villages.

63 mentors at sub-district level 18 supervisory mentors 1100 mentees 350 control MSMEs

C: Control (350 firms).
T1: Mentoring program (~360 firms, 21 mentors).
T2: Mentoring with enhanced capacity (~360 firms, 21 mentors).
T3: Mentoring with enhanced capacity and content (~360 firms, 21 mentors).