The Missing Curriculum
An RCT with 4,500 Nigerian women farmers added four days of negotiation and perseverance training to a standard business curriculum. Profits jumped 50%. A similar program in Togo returned 900% on cost over seven years. The missing ingredient was never bookkeeping.
Photo: Devdiscourse
The global women's entrepreneurship training industry teaches bookkeeping, marketing, and business planning. Meta-analyses consistently show these programs produce little to no profit gains for women-owned firms. Billions spent, needle barely moved.
Researchers ran an RCT with 4,500 agribusiness owners across six Nigerian states. They kept the business curriculum and added four days of negotiation, perseverance, and emotional regulation. Women who received the soft skills training saw profits jump over 50% — at $137 per participant. In Togo, a parallel program returned 900% on cost over seven years.
The constraint is social norms, not skills. In communities where women face less judgment for negotiating, profits soared. In conservative areas, the effect shrank. The curriculum works — but only when the environment lets women use it.
Our take
This is a curriculum misallocation problem. Billions flow into women's entrepreneurship programs that teach business skills with near-zero profit impact, while four days of negotiation training delivers 50% gains. The shift: soft skills aren't a complement to business training — they are the intervention. Funders should require negotiation and perseverance modules in every women's program they finance, starting with the next grant cycle.
What to do with this
Add a negotiation and perseverance module requirement to every women's entrepreneurship RFP issued this quarter. The cost is four days of training at $137 per participant; the return is a 50% profit increase. Flag any proposal that teaches only bookkeeping and marketing.
Run a social norms assessment before deploying negotiation training in conservative communities. In restrictive environments, skills alone underperform — pair training with community engagement sessions that create space for women to use what they learn.
Design a replication study of the Nigeria RCT in a non-agricultural sector within 12 months. The 50% profit gain among farmers and 900% ROI in Togo need cross-sector validation before funders can mandate this curriculum universally.
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