Women make up more than half of the total number of entrepreneurs in Africa. Yet, on average, for every dollar of profits men entrepreneurs earn, women entrepreneurs earn 66 cents. Supporting women to grow their firms would translate into higher economic growth for Sub-Saharan Africa

Young women in Africa are less likely to be employed than young men, as a result of gaps in access to resources such as skills, time, and capital, and due to underlying social norms. Adolescence is a particularly critical time to intervene, as teenage pregnancy or dropping out of school can have...

In Sierra Leone, the empowerment and livelihoods for adolescents (ELA) initiative sought to enhance adolescent girls’ social and economic empowerment by providing life skills training, livelihood training, and credit support to start income-generating activities. The Ebola crisis occurred...

Traditional customary land tenure systems often limit women’s land rights in Sub-Saharan Africa.In an ongoing experiment in rural Uganda, we offered households fully-subsidized land titles and basic information about the benefits of land titling.Providing additional gender information and...

The rate of informal firms is high in Sub-Saharan Africa, especially for those that are women-owned and in the poorest countries, despite a total of 107 business regulatory reforms recorded by Doing Business across 40 economies in the region. Through an experiment in Malawi, we established an...

Gender-based occupational segregation – where women are concentrated in low-paid or low-profit sectors – is a non-trivial source of the gender wage gap worldwide, accounting for as much as 50 percent of the gap in some countries (World Bank 2011). There is evidence that women's biases about...

Business training in low-income countries have scarcely shown impacts on revenues and profits, especially for female entrepreneurs. In this study, we test two kinds of trainings, one basic in-class training and one enhanced version supplemented with individualized coaching, to test their...

Extension services have been implemented on a large scale in developing countries for decades. However, there is little evidence on their impact on the productivity and welfare of farmers. Our study aims to begin to fill this evidence gap with the goal of identifying and encouraging the uptake...