Dr. Abu S. Shonchoy

Dr. Simon Quinn

Muhammad Meki

Meharab Bakhtiar

The project considers an innovative new microfinance product, based on the principles of equity financing, in which promising potential entrepreneurs are provided with capital, training and mentorship to help them become online freelancers. This provides a unique opportunity to study the incentive effects of profit-sharing between entrepreneurs and mentors. We hypothesize that entrepreneurial mentorship is more effective when mentors are incentivized directly by the productivity of their mentees: when they have ‘skin in the game’. We target Bangladeshi college graduates of rural areas to finance the relatively high initial cost of an online freelancing training program, using different microfinance contract