Training, Mentorship, and the Empowerment of Women: Evidence from an RCT in Egypt

Youth unemployment, especially among women, is high in several developing countries. In 2016, the authors have run a randomized experiment of a bundle of services to help young women in rural Egypt start their own micro-enterprises. The intervention provided a treatment group with business training, training on a skill (e.g. livestock rearing, tailoring, construction, etc.), in addition to a small grant and a small loan. A second treatment group got the same bundle as well as personalized mentorship support. These two treatments were compared to a randomized control group. 6-12 months later the researchers found large positive impacts of the two treatment arms on business entrepreneurship, income, subjective well-being, and decision making power. The project has secured funding to collect longer term data on these individuals 4 years after the implementation and just in the wake of the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic to examine if these impacts sustain over the long-run.