http://hdl.handle.net/11090/54 Working Papers 2026-07-29T06:09:41Z http://hdl.handle.net/11090/973 Networks, start-up capital and women’s entrepreneurial performance in Africa: Evidence from Eswatini Brixiová, Zuzana; Kangoye, Thierry This paper analyzes the role of networks in the access of female entrepreneurs to start-up capital and firm performance in Eswatini, a country with one of the highest female unemployment rates in Africa. The paper first shows that higher initial capital is associated with better sales performance for both men and women entrepreneurs. Women entrepreneurs start their firms with smaller start-up capital than men and are more likely to fund it from their own sources, which reduces the size of their firm and sales level. However, women with higher education start their firms with more capital than their less educated counterparts. Moreover, women who receive support from professional networks have higher initial capital, while those trained in financial literacy more often access external funding sources, including through their networks. 2019-12-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/11090/972 Training, Human Capital, and Gender Gaps in Entrepreneurial Performance Brixiová, Zuzana; Kangoye, Thierry; Said, Mona In the aftermath of the global financial crisis, policymakers have been increasingly striving to support female entrepreneurship as a possible growth driver. This paper contributes to reconciling mixed findings in the literature on the effectiveness of entrepreneurial training with an analysis that links training and human capital, including tertiary education and non-cognitive skills, with gender gaps in entrepreneurial performance in Africa. We have found that while financial literacy training directly benefits men, it does not raise the sales level of women entrepreneurs. Instead, tertiary education has a direct positive link with the performance of women. Consistent with our theoretical model where different skills are complements, tertiary education can act as a channel that makes training effective. Regarding non-cognitive skills, evidence shows that women entrepreneurs who are tenacious achieve stronger sales performance. Our results underscore the importance of incorporating tertiary education and entrepreneurial training programs focused on a balanced set of skills, including non-cognitive skills, among policies for women entrepreneurs. 2019-12-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/11090/971 Developing a Multidimensional Youth Employability Index to unpack vulnerabilities in the lived realities of youth in Post-apartheid South Africa Storme, Evelien; De Lannoy, Ariane; Leibbrandt, Murray; De Boeck, Filip; Mudiriza, Gibson Employability, understood as the ability to gain, sustain, and move on in employment, depends on and shapes circumstances in a young person’s lifeworld. In a Post-apartheid South Africa individual attributes as well as vulnerabilities in the young person’s home and neighbourhood all impact on labour outcomes. We develop a multidimensional youth employability index to capture this complexity following the Alkire and Foster method. We use the Census 2011 data. The results show that various forms of networks in the youth’s household and neighbourhood make a stronger contribution to their employability than do the individual’s attributes such as education, despite the latter’s prominence in the employability literature. There is a strong geographical component to employability and results are highly differentiated across municipalities. It matters greatly whether youth are in formal or informal work, have become discouraged or are unemployed and looking for a job when it comes to being employability deprived. However, large proportions of employed youth are employability deprived and lived realities at the lower end of the labour market are very similar with or without a job. Our results therefore demonstrate the usefulness of an expanded view on youth employability as it is able to unpack hardships that remain masked when using “employment” as a single indicator for youth’s socio-economic inclusion into the labour market. 2019-12-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/11090/970 Household Balance Sheets in South Africa Daniels, Reza C.; Khan, Safia This paper evaluates the composition of household portfolios including assets, liabilities and net worth in the National Income Dynamics Study (NIDS) wave 5 (SALDRU, 2018). The inclusion of a top up sample of 1005 households made the sample more representative of the South African population – particularly the higher end of the wealth distribution, which was previously under-represented because of panel attrition between Waves 1-4. This resulted in an increase in the estimates of real total household assets and liabilities (after the removal of outliers), bringing the distribution closer to the macroeconomic household balance sheet estimates of assets and liabilities provided by the SA Reserve Bank (SARB), which implies that the top-up sample also improved the external validity of the wealth data. We find that household balance sheets are dominated by real estate and vehicular assets and debts, with notable exceptions in different covariate domains. In terms of inequality between waves 4 and 5 of NIDS, there has been a slight decrease in the Gini coefficient on net-worth despite the top-up sample, but an increase in the Gini coefficient on financial assets. The overall conclusion of the paper is that the NIDS Wave 5 wealth module is fit for purpose and researchers can conduct a wide range of analyses with the data, but researchers still need to conduct their own outlier detection checks before commencing analyses. 2019-12-01T00:00:00Z