Economic Empowerment of Women-led Firms in Developing Countries

This is a review existing experimental and quasi-experimental studies on interventions that help women entrepreneurs in developing countries grow their business. There is still a lack of evidence about what works for women entrepreneurs and therefore there is still a pressing need to conduct more impact evaluation work to replicate findings (World Bank; 2018a). “Microfirms are an important player in developing countries, particularly for women. However, most of them perform poorly: they do not grow, they rarely or never hire workers outside of family members, and they have low productivity. Several explanations have been suggested for this poor performance, in particular, lack of access to credit and an overall lack of knowledge on how to run a business are among the most popular hypotheses (Lafortune et al., 2018, p. 222).” Women become entrepreneurs due to a variety of reasons – often also out of necessity due to lack of other employment opportunities. Nevertheless, entrepreneurship remains a significant pathway out of poverty and to boost women’s economic empowerment (Vasudevan and Wasilkowska, 2018). This document reviews the evidence with a focus on experimental and quasi-experimental studies specifically conducted on programs for and with women. The purpose is to be a resource and collect relevant information in one place and to provide guidance for future research and project managers to build on the collected body of work in order to improve the design of their studies and development projects. This report is in the form of a narrative review (rather than a formal “systematic” review) as coined by Evans and Popova, 2016 (see also Baird et al., 2018).2