Entrepreneurship education and teacher training in Rwanda

We assess, via a field experiment, how a comprehensive teacher training program affects the delivery of a major entrepreneurship curriculum reform in Rwanda. The reform introduced interactive pedagogy and a focus on business skills in the country’s required upper secondary entrepreneurship course. We randomly split a sample of 207 schools into treatment and control. Both groups received the government’s standard training. In addition, the treatment group was assigned intensive training organized by an NGO for two years. The training consisted of (i) six training sessions during school breaks, ii) exchange visits each term where teachers provided feedback to their peers, and (iii) outreach and support from NGO staff at least twice per year. The control group received only the default government training, which was not specific to entrepreneurship and lacked each of these elements. The program increased teachers’ use of active instruction, consistent with the reform’s features. These effects on pedagogy did not translate into improvements in student academic outcomes or skills. While still in secondary school, treated students increased participation in their own businesses by 5 percentage points, or 17% of the control mean. Wage employment (at others’ firms) declined by a commensurate amount in response to treatment, leaving no effect on overall income. These results suggest substitution between entrepreneurship and employment among students in treated schools.