Originally shared in our February 2026 Top of Mind Newsletter.
This issue of VoxDevLit’s literature review, Training Entrepreneurs, examines the effectiveness of over $1 billion in annual global spending on entrepreneurship training. While policymakers often fund these programs to drive broad job growth, the evidence suggests that the impact is much more personal. For youth and microenterprises, training typically increases an individual’s earnings and self-employment prospects, but it rarely creates immediate “new” jobs for others. Instead, it serves as a tool for individual agency, giving people the capacity to navigate their own success.
The research also shows that mindset-focused content is more effective than traditional business education:
- Personal Initiative Training: Encouraging a proactive mindset—seeking opportunities and learning from errors—consistently outperforms technical training in areas like record-keeping or marketing.
- Significant ROI: In some studies, this focus on proactive mindset boosted profits by 30%, with participants recouping their training costs in less than a year.
- Heuristics: Simplified “rule-of-thumb” training can be highly effective for subsistence entrepreneurs with lower formal education.
This data reinforces what Rahm Emanuel noted in our featured video: we cannot simply shrug our shoulders at failure or rely on outdated systems. Whether through a concrete graduation plan or a “personal initiative” curriculum, success starts with the expectation that individuals have the agency to solve their own problems and create their own path.