 Thank you for attending this session on interventions for employment creation in micro, small and medium-sized enterprises in low- and middle-income countries. This is work in progress we are presenting today on a systematic literature review. And why are we doing this? Well, we are all here because we want to promote inclusive growth and an important means for this end is employment creation. This is a major concern in many countries developed as well as developing countries. And it has been shown that especially in low- and middle-income countries most employment is in micro, small and medium-sized enterprises. This is why governments, donors and other stakeholders have designated substantial resources to the promotion of MSMEs but until recently there wasn't many rigorous evidence on the effectiveness of these interventions. And in the past years a lot of impact evaluations have emerged on the topic and this is why the German Development Bank KFW has commissioned a systematic review to answer the question which interventions are effective in creating employment in MSMEs and also enhancing the set of MSMEs. So this is kind of the motivation for the systematic review. And we apply standard systematic review methodology. This means that our methodology has been peer-reviewed and including our search. We searched a wide range of electronic databases and applied inclusion criteria to the studies we identified. And these criteria are, as regards population and context, we look at MSMEs which are defined as enterprises with up to 250 employees in low and middle income countries as defined by the World Bank. We also consider impact evaluations of the following interventions, training, access to finance, business development services, the promotion of research and development, private sector incentives, for instance wage subsidies and interventions in the broader area of enabling the business environment. Today we will only focus on the results for impact evaluations of training and access to finance because, as I said, it's still work in progress. And we also include studies that look at the impact of the outcome of interest which is employment. So this is measured either as number of employees or self-employment or new businesses who have been created. And we only consider rigorous impact evaluations which are either based on RCTs or quasi-experimental studies which account for control for self-selection or non-random placement. The results of our database search identified about 2,300 studies which we had to screened and where we applied inclusion criteria. And our final sample so far includes 63 studies there might be some more because we still aren't done with reference screening and we contacted a lot of key researchers for work in progress to see if they could also send us the working papers. But this is kind of where we are, 63 maybe 70 or 75 studies will be included. Today we focus on 28 of these studies which are in the area of training and finance, interventions and our sample includes studies from all major world regions most studies have been conducted in Latin America and the Caribbean but we were also very surprised to see that a large number of studies here is 7 focused on Sub-Saharan Africa. We didn't expect this at the beginning. Most studies have been conducted in upper middle income countries there are only a few in low income countries and the majority focuses on micro enterprises with households which are supposed to set up micro enterprises with up to 5 employees but most of them are only the owner. We have a majority of studies in the access to finance area but as I said we are still not done with the reference screening of the training interventions so this might change and there are also some studies which consider joint interventions where you combine business training with the provision of cash, grants or credits. We were also surprised to find that the majority of studies are based on RCTs here 18 studies and 10 are based on quasi-experimental designs and overall we have 18 outcomes in the area of business creation and self-employment and 20 outcomes in employment. There are more outcomes than studies because there are some studies that consider either joint and training interventions and compare them or that look at business creation as well as the number of employees in the enterprise. Coming now to very preliminary results which is more kind of an overview of what the studies find. We considered significance at 10% and we looked at how many studies find statistically significant positive or negative effects or insignificant effects. This is for the whole sample and for employment as well as business creation outcomes and as of now we can't really see if these interventions are effective because we find that about 50% are positively significant and then we also have the same range of insignificant results. However training interventions seem to be more effective just from kind of eyeballing and this pattern holds for employment outcomes as well as business creation outcomes. By enterprise size we see that we have more positively significant results for smaller medium-sized enterprises so almost all of them are access to finance interventions and almost all of them are quasi-experimental so we have more significantly positive results for quasi-experimental and there we want to assess also if this is really due to the research design or if these are the results. Concluding so far, as I said, there is no overall indication of effectiveness however we still plan to conduct meta-analysis and to assess a bit the heterogeneity and on which conditions the impacts depend. Overall the studies confirm that MSMEs face credit constraints as well as skill constraints. Access or training interventions are much more effective in improving intermediate outcomes such as accounting but they have difficulties in improving final outcomes employment business performance and access to training and access to finance doesn't seem to be effective on itself so there seem to be more constraints for the enterprises in expanding the workforce.