Street Business School (SBS) is an award-winning nonprofit, providing one-of-a-kind entrepreneurial training for women, proven to significantly increase incomes and lift families out of poverty with dignity.

SBS has scaled its impact through a social franchise strategy, in which nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) are trained to deliver the program to people in their local communities. This partnership approach enables greater impact and effectiveness, combining the successful SBS training model with the NGO partner’s expertise and customization to meet the unique needs of the local community.

Through this approach, SBS will equip 1 million women with business training, helping them to transform their lives and lift themselves and their 5 million children out of poverty.

SBS prioritizes rigorous evaluation and has a robust data collection system, tracking the progress of NGO partners and their beneficiaries, as well as the Learning Lab, which is the original SBS direct delivery program in Uganda. The years 2020 and 2021 were like no others with a worldwide pandemic leading to significant economic shocks, as well as lockdowns and social distancing mandates that kept people at home. This Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) report shares impact data collected prior to and during COVID, highlighting the impacts of the global pandemic on SBS, our partners and entrepreneurs and the adaptive measures adopted to respond to the pandemic. We share stories of how our partners and women entrepreneurs applied the lessons of SBS to not only creatively respond to the pandemic but also to thrive.

The impact results shared in this report are compiled from three sources:

  1. Randomized Control Trial (RCT): Data from an RCT conducted by researchers from J-PAL and Universidad del Rosario between 2018 – 2021.
  2. NGO Partner Data: Data from our global NGO partners collected through the SBS Impact Tracker.
  3. Learning Lab: Data on innovations carried out and tested by the Uganda Learning Lab, our R&D hub.

Data from these three sources shows consistent and robust income growth that helps graduates of SBS lift their families out of poverty. This is critical to note since it represents data gathered from different countries and contexts, and with a variety of evaluation tools.

KEY OUTCOMES

Graduates of SBS see a significant increase in income. Graduates in the RCT doubled their incomes and ended with incomes that were 110 percent higher than those in the control group. This success is despite the fact that, because of the timeframe of the study, 83 percent of the data gathered was on businesses impacted by COVID. Graduates trained by NGO partners, many of whom submitted pre-COVID data, increased their incomes by 195 percent.

SBS graduates move out of deep poverty. Graduates of the RCT increased their average earnings of $2.47/day at baseline to $4.82/day 1 year after graduation. Graduates of NGO partners went from $1.13 per day at baseline to $3.33 per day one year after graduation.

Business ownership increased across all groups. Business ownership among RCT participants increased from 52 percent at baseline to 73 percent at graduation. Participants trained by NGO partners increased from 57 percent business ownership at baseline to 85 percent at graduation.