Is there a low cost way to provide young people in developing countries with the skills and the mindset required to create their own jobs? We address this questions by evaluating an edutainment show broadcasted on national television in Tanzania, aimed at inspiring young people to start their own business and teaching them how to do so. In a field experiment, where a treatment group was incentivized to watch the edutainment show and a control group was incentivized to watch another program, we find strong evidence of edutainment inspiring the viewers to learn more about entrepreneurship. Moreover, we find that the show shaped their entrepreneurial mindset. In contrast, the impact of edutainment on business knowledge was more muted. In sum, our results suggest that media may be a very powerful tool to promote entrepreneurship among young people, but also points to limitations of edutainment as a tool to communicate business knowledge and shape social norms.

Joint with Kjetil Bjorvatn, Alexander W. Cappelen, Linda Helgesson Sekei and Bertil Tungodden.