Socioemotional skills training and agribusiness entrepreneurial motivation among educated youth: experimental evidence from Nigeria

This paper shows results from a three-arm cluster-randomized trial evaluating the effect of socioemotional and digital skills modules added to a standard agribusiness training program for National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) members in Nigeria. Participants were randomly assigned to agribusiness training alone (control), agribusiness plus a two-hour socioemotional skills session (T1), or agribusiness plus socioemotional and digital skills sessions (T2). The primary outcomes are measures of entrepreneurial motivation, that is GLS-weighted Anderson motivation and stated intentions to start, formalize, and save for an agribusiness, assessed four months post-training. These outcomes are the most proximal cognitive antecedents of enterprise creation but are not equivalent to realized entrepreneurial behaviour. Using ANCOVA, the results show that socioemotional skills training (T1) raises the motivation index by 0.216 standard deviations. Effects on the individual binary outcomes are positive but small and not individually significant. Adding a digital skills component to the curriculum eliminates these gains entirely, though this characterisation reflects an association rather than a fully identified mechanism. The socioemotional skills effect is consistent with a risk-tolerance pathway. Thus, the results indicate that brief, targeted socioemotional interventions can shift agribusiness entrepreneurial motivation in resource-constrained settings, but that adding technical content to a socioemotional curriculum does not automatically preserve motivational gains. However, follow-up data on actual business creation represent an important direction for future work.