Vocational and Business Training to Improve Women’s Labour Market
Outcomes in low- and middle-income countries: a systematic review
Vocational training has small positive effects on employment, formal employment, and earnings. Business training combined with other programme components has positive effects on self-employment, and sales or profits. These relatively small effects may be insufficient to justify scaling up vocational or business training programmes. Design variations to increase impact need to be tested.
Women around the world often perform jobs with minimal skill requirements and encounter few opportunities for learning and advancement. Governments and development agencies try to improve women’s skills through vocational and business training programmes.
This review summarises evidence on the impacts of such programmes, and on the barriers to and facilitators of vocational and business training effectiveness.
What is the aim of this review?
This Campbell systematic review examines the impact of vocational and business training targeted at women in low- and middle-income countries. The review summarises evidence from thirty-five quantitative studies with an experimental or quasi-experimental design. The review summarises the impact of 30 interventions, containing data from over 80,000 women. The qualitative narrative meta-synthesis includes findings from 50 studies.