Findings and Lessons from a Meta-review of Evidence on the Impacts of Interventions to Promote Entrepreneurship in Developing Country Contexts

Strong evidence on the effectiveness of small business support interventions is crucial to enhance the development of small businesses and their economic development contributions. A meta-review of the evidence contained in four systematic reviews evaluating the effectiveness of over 100 interventions was conducted in order to identify the main lessons regarding what has worked well and what has not worked well. Opportunities to improve the way in which systematic reviews are carried out have been identified. With respect to the impacts of business development interventions, the systematic reviews find positive impacts on various levels of outcomes, but that it is difficult to generalise these findings for a number of reasons. There is a need to monitor business outcomes over a longer period of time, as well to include intervention cost effectiveness information to better inform policy makers. There is also a need for clearer framework or typology for business development interventions, as well as a clear framework to guide impact evaluations and for reporting on job creation/ destruction impacts. The use of theory-driven approaches to evaluating entrepreneurship and business development interventions can improve understanding of the often complex pathways or causal linkages which may ultimately lead to job creation and/or preservation. There are often lengthy time-frames of a few years between the implementation of interventions and the ways in which these may impact on entrepreneurs and businesses. Evaluation studies will need to factor these time-frames into their design and increasingly collect longitudinal data.