Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

There is a consensus in the literature that entrepreneurship, the pursuit of opportunity beyond
resources controlled, stimulates economic growth by, among other reasons, reducing
unemployment. Such benefit has led many policy-makers to promote entrepreneurship skills, but
interventions involving in-school education have been consistently underrated and
underreported. This paper presents the preliminary findings of an entrepreneurship program
launched in 2018 with the help of USAID and a local NGO in Pune-India, in four uppersecondary
public schools and provides lessons learned along the way. I discuss the challenges,
successes and learnings I received while setting up the program and the initial results of
the Randomized-Controlled Trial that we conducted for the treatment and the control
groups in partnership with BRAC Uganda.

The entrepreneurship program has two major elements: classroom training,
live case-studies spanning over 6 months. We took a unique approach of
bringing in local micro-entrepreneurs as guest speakers for story-telling and mentorship,
alongside classroom learning, as students resonate better with more relatable role-models.
The starting point of this endeavor involved conducting semi-structured interviews of 70 students
that were to receive the treatment and 15 teachers who were directly or indirectly part of the
program implementation. Interviewing the students helped determine the key building blocks for
entrepreneurship development curriculum, while interviewing the teachers helped me gauge the
the pedagogical depth and indulgence I could realistically expect in the classrooms. We
conducted a RCT of the pilot to determine the extent to which students would benefit from the
program based on the following pre-decided outcomes: 1) learn, visualize and understand
business processes, 2) improve self-confidence, public-speaking and leadership skills, 3)
improve workforce readiness, 4) implement ideas practically with the help of mentorship and
seed-funding. I chose to partner with LAHI, as the NGO primarily focuses on providing
vocational skills to over 400,000 students in 22 provinces in India. This allowed me to leverage
our partnership in two aspects:

1) A study conducted by Oosterbeek et al showed that Junior Achievement
Company Program (JACP) cohort in vocational colleges showed higher long-term entrepreneurial intentions than JACP cohort in other non-vocational high-schools. LAHI’s students allowed me to draw on these findings and capitalize on the initial work done by the NGO in developing core technical skills in students.2) LAHI’s sheer scale and outreach helped me leverage the existing social capital of the
teachers, to receive buy-in from both, the school administrators as well as the students.

The World Bank’s World Development Report states that while early childhood is optimal
to acquire foundational cognitive skills, however, higher-order cognitive skills are regularly
developed in late adolescence and early adulthood, in parallel with technical skills that are
relevant for the labor market. In light of these findings my paper provides additional evidence to
support the WB’s findings. It also emphasizes the importance of meticulously setting up an
entrepreneurship program at the confluence of vocational training and mainstream education.

Apart from highlighting the positives of the program, I analyze logistical and
organizational situations we came across such as trainer motivation, coordinated
efforts among the administrative stuff, and the peril of downplaying socio-cultural nuances and
how that eventually affected the ground-level implementation. Later, I also discuss
the methods used by our team in troubleshooting such problems