The data collected from the experiment consists of variations in sizes of businesses owned by women and men. It also consists of the profits from their respective businesses following the type of capital injection. Standard models of investment predict that credit-constrained firms should grow rapidly when given additional capital, and that how this capital is provided should not affect decisions to invest in the business or consume the capital. In this project, we randomly gave cash and in-kind grants to male- and female-owned micro-enterprises in urban Ghana for women running subsistence enterprises to assess the differences in profit gains from either treatments.

The project purposely chose urban Ghana as the setting for this study. The choice of Ghana was motivated by the desire to provide evidence in an African context, in a country known for a history of involvement of women in business which provides a setting that is conducive to female business success. Women in Ghana have similar labour force participation rates to men, and are more likely to be self-employed. Evidence of this is seen in data from the 2000 Ghanaian Census: the labour-force participation rates for 15–60 year olds are 69.6% for females and 73.9% for males, and in urban areas 45% of females are non-agricultural own-account workers, compared to 33% of males. Within Ghana we chose Accra, the capital and largest city, and the nearby industrial city of Tema. A sample of micro-enterprises was then constructed as follows. First, enumeration areas (EAs) were selected with probability proportional to the number of households in these EAs according to the 2000 census. We randomly selected 70 EAs in Accra and 30 in Tema. Then, to reduce the costs of listing, we subdivided EAs into equal areas, such that each area would contain approximately 70–80 households. This typically required dividing an EA into half or thirds. One of these areas was then randomly selected from each EA. Enumerators went door to door in this area to carry out a screening survey of each household. The households were screened to identify those with an individual aged 20–55 who was self-employed and working 30 or more hours per week in a business with no paid employees and no motorised vehicle. These criteria were used to select full-time micro-enterprise owners who were not so large that the grants in our experiment would have little effect.