Over the past two decades, entrepreneurship training programmes for smallholders have proliferated across the continent, supported by development partners, NGOs, governments and entrepreneurship support organisations (ESOs). The intention is sound. The evidence of effectiveness, however, is considerably more uncertain. Training frequently fails to produce the livelihood improvements it promises, not because the concept of agri-entrepreneurship training is flawed, but because the design and delivery of programmes diverge significantly from what the accumulated evidence on effective training actually recommends.
This paper draws together what that evidence says. It derives 11 design principles for effective agri-entrepreneurship training from practitioner literature, NGO reports, training manuals and development programme evaluations, organised across training content, process, and governance. It then applies these principles to a case study of agri entrepreneurship training practices in Burundi, a heavily aid-dependent country where development partners and local actors invest substantially in smallholder support, and where the gap between design principles and practice turns out to be wide.
The aim is not primarily to critique what is happening in Burundi specifically, but to use it as a grounded illustration of a broader pattern: the conditions under which training is most likely to fail, and by implication the conditions under which it is most likely to succeed.
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