Funded by IPA’s Entrepreneurship and Private Sector Development Program, researchers are conducting a study in Uganda to measure how the characteristics of instructors shaped soft skills acquisition and long-run economic outcomes for secondary school graduates who participated in a skills development and entrepreneurship program. Results will be available in 2027.

The Challenge

In low- and middle-income countries, investments in youth entrepreneurship and skills programs have expanded substantially, supported by growing evidence that training in both technical business skills and soft skills can improve employment and earnings.¹ However, even well-designed programs with clearly specified curricula can produce mixed results, and knowledge gaps remain why some programs work better than others. As such, identifying those factors is important to develop effective skills programs at scale.

Instructors are among the most impactful levers available to program designers. In formal education settings, research shows that the quality of instructors has meaningful consequences for what participants learn² and how they perform in the longer run.³ However, significantly less is known about which teacher characteristics make them effective in terms of developing entrepreneurial and socio-emotional skills.⁴ Understanding which instructor characteristics drive those differences can help programs make better decisions about who to recruit, how to train instructors, and how to assign them to maximize learning impacts.

The Evaluation

Researchers are leveraging the randomized design of the Skills for Effective Entrepreneurship Development (SEED) program in Uganda to estimate how differences across instructors affect participants’ learning and long-run economic outcomes. The study follows the 3,200 youth randomly assigned to receive SEED training and leverages the random assignment of teachers to training sites and classrooms.

Leveraging the randomized assignment of teachers in SEED, the research team first estimates teachers’ causal value added and then identifies the knowledge, socio-emotional skills, personality traits, and gender characteristics associated with larger causal teacher effects. They then examine whether exposure to teachers with these characteristics affects long-run entrepreneurship and labor-market outcomes through participants’ short-run skill acquisition.

In the original SEED study, teachers were randomly assigned to curricula and training sites, while participants were likewise randomly assigned to sites. This design made it so that participants’ exposure to individual instructors was completely random, allowing the researchers to estimate each teacher’s causal contribution (teacher value added) to participants’ outcomes. Their study then examines whether differences in teacher value added can be explained by instructors’ business knowledge, socio-emotional skills, personality traits, and gender. It also investigates whether teacher gender and teacher-student gender matching influence learning and the persistence of program impacts.

The researchers combine data on participants’ business knowledge and socio-emotional skills measured immediately after the three-week training with four-year and nine-year follow-up data on entrepreneurship, business performance, employment, and earnings to identify the instructor characteristics associated with both short-run skill formation and long-run economic success.

Results

Results will be available in 2027.

The Program

The Skills for Effective Entrepreneurship Development (SEED) program was a three-week, in-residence entrepreneurship training delivered in 2013 to youth in their final year of secondary school at 20 host-school sites across Uganda. The program offered 1) a hard skills curriculum that primarily focused on business and technical topics like accounting, financial management, and operations and 2) a soft skills curriculum to build competencies in goal setting, self-management, persuasion, and negotiation. Each school was staffed by three instructors, with two randomly assigned to the regular curriculum and one randomly assigned to business plan instruction.

The SEED program produced strong findings over multiple follow-up periods. After four years, participants showed improvements in hard and soft skills, including negotiation, communication, self-efficacy, and stress management. Students were more likely to start businesses and operated higher-quality ventures, which were more likely to be formal, have employees, and apply effective business management practices. After nine years, SEED graduates operated firms with 20 percent higher revenues and 16 percent higher profits, without corresponding increases in capital or labor inputs. The program generated returns of 20 to 27 times its costs, with total costs estimated at USD 143 per student.

Sources

^1. Chioda, Laura, Paul Gertler, David Contreras-Loya, and Dana R. Carney. Making Entrepreneurs: Long Term Returns to Training Youth in Business Skills. No. w34637. National Bureau of Economic Research, 2026.

^2. Kremer, Michael, Conner Brannen, and Rachel Glennerster. "The challenge of education and learning in the developing world." Science 340, no. 6130 (2013): 297-300.

Evans, David K., and Anna Popova. "What really works to improve learning in developing countries? An analysis of divergent findings in systematic reviews." The World Bank Research Observer 31, no. 2 (2016): 242-270.

^3. Jackson, C. Kirabo. "What do test scores miss? The importance of teacher effects on non–test score outcomes." Journal of political Economy 126, no. 5 (2018): 2072-2107.

Kraft, Matthew A. "Teacher effects on complex cognitive skills and social-emotional competencies." Journal of Human Resources 54, no. 1 (2019): 1-36.

^4. Bau, Natalie, and Jishnu Das. "Teacher value added in a low-income country." American Economic Journal: Economic Policy 12, no. 1 (2020): 62-96.