Athena Infonomics has been commissioned by the German Agency for International Cooperation (GIZ) to evaluate a project entitled "Employment Promotion in the Informal Sector by Leveraging Diaspora Money Transfers," facilitated by WIDU, an online platform that provides funding and coaching to small businesses in several African countries.

The program, being implemented in Cameroon and Ghana, is funded by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), and aims to promote employment in the informal sector by leveraging diaspora money transfers. Through this work, start-ups and micro-entrepreneurs are supported with improved access to finance and entrepreneurial capacity-building, leading to improved income generation and job creation.

This evaluation will focus on measuring the impact of WIDU, based on an experimental setting involving the comparison of a treatment and control group. The evaluation will be complemented by a qualitative component to generate data on attributable effects of the WIDU project, and to better understand how the intervention and effects take place.

To ensure an effective and needs-tailored implementation of this Rigorous Impact Evaluation (RIE), Athena Infonomics is supported by its partner Scio Network GmBH & Co KG, a Germany-based global solutions lab for international development, which has been providing advisory services on the roll-out and further development of the WIDU.africa platform since 2020.

To learn more about this evaluation, contact Bilal Afroz at bilal.a@athenainfonomics.com.