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.

September 2024: We update our pre-registration to record changes to our intervention design. These changes were required due to implementation hurdles that emerged during the implementation of the original intervention design. In particular, while we were able to successfully deliver the training components of the original intervention design, in consultation with our government partner, we decided to discontinue the monitoring activities shortly after the rollout due to unforeseen challenges. Specifically, feedback from mentors indicated significant concerns regarding the coordination of their mentoring sessions and the visits of our team of experts, which led to logistical difficulties. These challenges, coupled with resulting tensions between mentors and our team of experts, ultimately necessitated the cessation of the monitoring activities.

After multiple discussions with our government partner, we decided to modify our main intervention in the following way: our capacity building efforts will only focus on supporting MSMEs’ adoption of e-commerce strategies and halal certification, i.e. there will no longer be capacity building on communication and how to mentor/coach effectively. Moreover, the capacity building will take place in small groups via Zoom. This new approach aligns better with the needs of the mentors and is more practical to implement.

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.

September 2024: With the new intervention, we will re-randomize treatment status across the entire sample and stratify it by prior treatment status (T1, T2 and T3). This step is taken because our new intervention focuses on capacity building related to supporting MSMEs’ adoption of e-commerce and halal certification. It differs substantially from our previous intervention, which focused on communication, and especially gender-inclusive mentoring in both T2 and T3. Layering the new e-commerce adoption and halal certification intervention on top of the existing training we have already provided would create a fairly complex bundle of treatments which are non-trivial to disentangle.

Planned number of observations:

61 mentors at the sub-district level (2 mentors left the program since the original pre-registration has been submitted)
1100 mentees

Sample size by treatment arms:

C_NEW: Control (30 mentors, approximately 550 firms)
T_NEW: Treatment Group (31 mentors, approximately 550 firms)

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).