The top-down approach and some more details on the intervention

In this new entry, I want to talk more about the top-down intervention. This intervention consists of a facilitation service to overcome structural blocks in women’s access to finance, networks, and markets. It uses a top-down approach to improve critical areas of the environment women entrepreneurs face while doing business.

Specifically, the intervention provides women entrepreneurs access to facilitation services to a set of agreed access to market, network, and finance opportunities (FNM). The female entrepreneurs in this group will be connected to facilitators trained under the program.

As I explained in my previous post, the researchers will also perform a bottom-up intervention that consists of a Social Gender Role training. The targeted population for these interventions is female entrepreneurs interested in the program. The idea is that the research team will randomly assign eligible applicants to the program into one of the following four groups (three treatment arms and the control group):

i. Social Gender Role training (SGR)

ii. Facilitation services to access finance, networking, and markets opportunities (FNM)

iii. A combination of both SGR and FNM

iv. Control group

Why is this design necessary for the study? Because it will allow the research team to compare the relative effectiveness of the bottom-up or top-down approaches. Moreover, it will enable them to determine potential complementarities between the two approaches in order to unlock the potential of female entrepreneurs.