Do Gender and Business Trainings Affect Business Outcomes? Experimental Evidence from Vietnam

We use an RCT to evaluate the impact of a gender and business training for female clients of a microfinance institution in northern Vietnam, and consider the impact on business knowledge, practices and outcomes, as well as firm entry and exit decisions. In addition, we vary the nature of the intervention by inviting husbands to participate in the trainings for a subsample of the treated centers. To gauge both short and medium-term effects, we combine data from two separate post-interventions surveys. We find evidence of economically substantive impacts on knowledge, practices and outcomes, and on the extensive margin (entry and exit). We also document that it takes time for the “downstream” outcomes of the trainings to materialize – while we find evidence of medium-term effects, no such evidence exists for the short-term. Inviting husbands to participate in the trainings does not affect any of our knowledge or practice measures, but we document weak evidence for differential impact on profits.