Mentoring Business Owners in Uganda: Who Benefits from What?

This project studies the relationship between different forms of mentorship and business outcomes in a two-stage field experiment in Gulu, Uganda. The project involves randomly assigning small businesses into one of three groups: a control and two mentorship treatments in which successful local business owners mentor other small business owners. The treatments differ based on the training given to the mentor, as half are randomly assigned to a consultant from Accenture. The goal is to assess the impact of formal consulting on relatively successful businesses, the impact of informal local mentoring on less successful businesses, and the pass-through of knowledge from local mentors with a consulting relationship to their mentees. In particular, the project aims to understand how training impacts outcomes for businesses of different sizes, providing insight into the best ways to design training without resorting to “one size fits all” policies.