Building Women's Skills for Economic Inclusion and Resilience

Can skills-based programs promote women’s economic inclusion? This study randomizes access to a program teaching entrepreneurship skills in rural Uganda. The program covers record-keeping, identifying business opportunities, raising capital, and soft skills like perseverance and confidence, but it provides no access to cash or capital. Treated women are 17 percent more likely to generate income from their own businesses 18 months post-program. They heavily re-invest in their businesses. High-frequency data show that treated women also fare significantly better during the COVID-19 lockdown than women in the control group. Exploiting social network data, this paper detects positive network-based spillovers to the control group and provides novel tools to adjust estimates accordingly. Although the program is not transformative, the results indicate an important role for skills-based programming in efforts for economic inclusion among rural, low-income women.