Abstract: We study the medium- and long-term impacts of the Skills for Effective Entrepreneurship Development (SEED) program, an in-residence 3-week mini-MBA program for high school students modeled after western business school curricula and adapted to the Ugandan context. Two versions of the curriculum were implemented: the hard skills MBA features a mix of approximately 75% hard skills and 25% soft skills; the soft skills curriculum has the reverse mix. Using data on 4,400 youth from a nationally representative sample in a 3-arm field experiment in Uganda, the (medium-term) 4-year follow-up demonstrated that training was effective in improving both hard and soft skills, but only the soft skills curriculum was directly linked to improvements in self-efficacy, persuasion, and negotiation. Four years after the intervention, youth in both groups were more likely to start enterprises and more successful in ensuring the survival of their businesses. Businesses started by the treatment groups were also of higher quality: more likely to be formal, having employees, and being collaborations with other entrepreneurs. With roughly 52% of the sample still enrolled in post-secondary education four years post-intervention,  we find suggestive evidence that ventures started by the treatment groups are better performing than those of the control group along several dimensions: revenues (SEED hard: $20.7 or 7%; SEED soft: $16.4 or 5.5%) and profits (SEED hard: $7.9 or 5.4%; SEED soft: $13.8 or 9.5%). Nine years after the intervention (the long-term), the entrepreneurial efforts of the treatment and control groups increased significantly: approximately 58% of the sample owned an active business, with no statistical differences across treatment arms. However, ventures led by SEED graduates maintained their edge in terms of quality. They were also larger in scale as proxied by revenues (SEED hard: $214.4/month or 20.7%, SEED soft: $195.2/month or 18.7%) and commanded higher profits (SEED hard: $74.6/month or 15.8%, SEED soft: $78.4/month or 16.6%). The program also led to significant improvements business practices in the form of competition and business management practices as well as more innovation (i.e., reliance on more modern financial and management technologies). We estimate that the indirect effect of improvements in business practices and management accounts for roughly 50% of the treatment effect on business earnings. Both SEED curricula were highly cost effective. The program’s costs were roughly $160.14 per youth, whereas the present discounted value of incremental SEED-induced business earnings alone ranges between $1,119.52 (6.7x) and $1,296.57 (8.7x) under the very conservative assumption of no impacts emerging until year four nor persisting beyond year 9. 
 

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