Results

Monitoring and Evaluation

The Business Women Connect pilot incorporated a rigorous evaluation, including the previously mentioned baseline survey administered between May and July of 2016, a midline survey conducted about 12 months after the baseline, and an endline survey conducted 18 months after the baseline. To track project progress, the team also selected indicators at the design stage that could be easily monitored and reported, enabling them to gauge the effectiveness of the gender-related project components.

Indicators for Business Women Connect, Tanzania

Indicators for Business Women Connect, Tanzania

Theory of Change

Theory of change

Log frame

Log Frame

Project actions

​​Results

Beneficiaries participating in the mobile savings intervention alone saved twice as much money weekly through M-Pawa than did the control group. The mobile savings intervention also increased new business creation and the level of resilience among existing businesses encountering unexpected financial shocks.

In addition, borrowing from M-Pawa increased, and women microentrepreneurs who established mobile money savings accounts were 14 percent more likely to receive a mobile loan. The women who participated in both the mobile savings and the business skills training saved almost four times as much money on a weekly basis than did those not participating in either activity. It is important to note that when the female microentrepreneurs began saving through M-Pawa, data indicated that they were not necessarily saving more overall, but rather shifting the savings cache at home to secure mobile accounts.

Women laptop

Adding the business training on top of the mobile savings intervention led to substantial increases in business investment: business practices such as recordkeeping and financial planning improved, capital investment went up by about 40 percent, total hours worked by the women increased by more than three per week, and the likelihood of individual women running multiple businesses or introducing new products also went up. The research team is currently conducting a longer-term follow-up mobile phone survey to examine how this increased business investment translated into greater profitability.

The increased savings also improved women’s intrahousehold decision-making power. Women who were encouraged to open mobile savings accounts indicated that they had greater decision-making power over their business and household expenditure allocations as compared to women who did not open mobile savings accounts.

Monitoring and Evaluation