entrepreneurship in uganda

 

Jobs are hard to find in developing economies like Uganda's. The youth are often unemployed. Facilitating an entrepreneurial mindset in Ugandan youth has been something a number of NGOs and labs and governments have been working on. But there is not yet much compelling evidence that these expensive, western-influenced interventions work. In 2011 Paul Gertler, a labor economist, recruited the micro lab to help with a randomized controlled field experiment with approximately 4,000 Ugandan teenagers. After many years, and a 2-week long intervention, we are finally analyzing data from the 2-year follow-up and the data are fascinating. We are working on the paper(s) now but the bottom line is that we had 3 arms to the experiment: a pure control (no intervention), a "soft skills" arm (in which they learned nonverbal sensitivity, persuasion techniques, negotiation principles and other critical social psychological skills), and a "hard skills" arm (in which they learned about labor markets, management principles, supply and demand, balancing a budget). We have some good ideas about which types of interventions lead to better labor market outcomes and how to scale up these interventions depending on what sorts of outcomes are valued. This project and others like it are ongoing. Stay tuned!