Entrepreneurship, Employment and Social Stability in Rwanda

Job creation is a key component of transforming Rwanda into a stable and prosperous country. Private sector development will have to play an important role in this process, and should prevent a grievance-induced collapse back into violence. Tackling unemployment among Rwandan youth is increasingly recognised as a priority for policy makers. We propose to organise a field experiment in Rwanda that involves the provision of business training to a sample of secondary school and university graduates. We will examine the impact of such training on the propensity to successfully start a business, demand for labour, and attitudes towards cooperation, reciprocity, and violence. We will use experimental games to measure such attitudes, combining representatives from different social groups in Rwanda to also study horizontal inequalities. We also intend to revisit treated (and control) groups to probe the persistence of impact of entrepreneurship training (if any), and will test for spillover effects by examining outcomes among friends or kin of treated individuals.