Can Mentorship and Village Savings and Loans Groups Improve the Impacts of Business Training for Women in Conflict Affected areas of Nigeria?

This evaluation tests the impacts of three interventions that were added-on to a yearlong women’s empowerment and business training program:
1) Village Savings and Loans Associations (VSLA) groups with program participants. Women were provided training on how to set up VSLA group governance and by-laws, conduct record-keeping, and taught example meeting procedures. The VSLA meetings were incorporated into program implementation and VSLA group leaders were given additional support. Women were defaulted into a group but had the option to leave after the first cycle share-out.
2) Group Mentorship. Meetings twice a month for six months post-graduation, with a business mentor in their same small business training cohort from the regular programming, approximately 25 women. Each session combined a space for peer-to-peer mentoring and support as well as guided facilitation to address the challenges women faced in their small businesses including reviewing processes such as keeping records, calculating profits, setting achievable goals, conducting a SWOT analysis, making a business plan, or seeking and receiving a loan.
3) Individual Mentorship. Meetings twice a month for six months post-graduation, with a business mentor one-on-one. Mentors identified challenges the mentee faced in their small businesses through conversation and observation, and developed goals for improvement and growth. Mentors guided mentees through processes such as keeping records, calculating profits, setting achievable goals, conducting a SWOT analysis, making a business plan, or seeking and receiving a loan in a one-on-one manner.

2018-04-25

2019-12-31

Our primary outcome measures will be of economic wellbeing (earnings, assets, savings, loans, and experience of economic shocks) and business practices (record keeping, business investments, engagement in business promotion, negotiating better prices with suppliers), and business sustainability (is the business still active).

Secondary outcomes for this study are health and wellbeing of women participants and their families (subjective wellbeing, self-efficacy, experience of shocks and coping mechanisms, locus of control, social group participation, household decision making and gender (involvement of women in decision making, women’s name on land deeds).

Participants in the women’s empowerment program were randomly assigned into one of four treatment arms: control group (250 women), VSLA (250 women), group mentorship (250 women), and VSLA and group mentorship (250 women). This random assignment was done at the village-based training group level. Additionally, the individual mentorship intervention was randomly assigned across all four arms of the study. The individual mentorship assignment was at the individual level creating a group of 500 women that received individual mentorship and 500 women that did not. This factorial design of the study allows for analysis of each of the three treatment interventions.

Randomization done in office by a computer.

Randomization into the VSLA and group mentorship interventions were done at the village-based training group level stratified by state and previous program exposure. Randomization into the individual mentorship intervention was done second at the individual woman level stratified by treatment VSLA and group mentorship treatment arms.

Yes

40 village-based training groups

1000 women

10 village-based training groups control, 10 village-based training groups VSLA only, 10 village-based training groups group mentorship only, 10 village-based training groups VSLA and group mentorship. Orthogonal random assignment to 500 women individual mentorship and 500 women to control (no individual mentorship).

Rounseville Aker_Nigeria Mentorship and VSLA add ons to business training_Pre-Analysis Plan