Study Overview
Causal evidence on the long-run and intergenerational effects of entrepreneurship and skills training in low-income countries remains limited. The strongest existing evidence comes from adolescent life-skills and empowerment programs, which generated persistent effects on fertility, marriage, and schooling four to seven years after implementation (Austrian et al., 2020; Bandiera et al., 2020). Evidence on impacts extending to the next generation is scarcer still. Outside cash-transfer programs, one of the few experimental studies documents increased investment in children following the introduction of flexible microfinance repayment schedules in India (Field et al., 2021). This gap contrasts sharply with the education literature, which provides growing evidence that schooling investments affect outcomes across generations (Duflo et al., 2024, and references therein).
We propose a 13-year follow-up of the Study of Entrepreneurship and Entrepreneurial Development (SEED), a randomized evaluation of entrepreneurship and soft-skills training for youth in Uganda. Combining a new survey with existing baseline, four-year, and nine-year data, the study will estimate treatment effects on long-run economic outcomes, psychological well-being, family formation, intra-household decision-making, and children’s human-capital investments and well-being. Repeated measures of soft skills, mental health, and economic outcomes will allow us to study the mechanisms underlying persistence: whether early improvements in socio-emotional skills endure, whether they expand economic opportunities, and whether these gains translate into improved outcomes for participants’ households and children. The study will thus provide rare experimental evidence on both the durability and intergenerational reach of youth skills investments.