Reading Our Cohort Data Against the Movers-to-Makers Frame

The editors of Women in the Technology and Innovation Ecosystem: From Movers to Makers in America close their preface with thanks “to the ones still in transition, still navigating, still becoming.” Those women receive a dedication, while most of the book’s evidence comes from women who arrived. AVODA’s one published outcome count looks at the whole group: a drop-out split from 99 alumni, 15% registered, 25% informal and 45% without a business. Read against the book’s frame, with the East African evidence beside it, that count says less than it first seems to, because making here runs in loops, so a founder’s status on one date is a point on a line that often bends back toward a second business.

Key Takeaways

The movers-to-makers frame describes a one-way journey and draws its evidence mostly from women who completed it: portraits, two reported interviews, and a 40-person questionnaire of expatriates still living abroad.
AVODA’s public figures are 1,247+ applied, 600+ trained and 100+ startups supported across 18 programs in three countries. None records where a founder started or whether she moved, so the “mover” half of the frame sits outside them.
Our one published outcome count, from 99 alumni, is a status on one date: 15% registered, 25% informal, 45% without a business. It reports what alumni told us and carries no gender split.
In Uganda, closure and restart are ordinary. In GEM data for 2003 to 2004, about 30% of businesses failed, and 37.5% of people who had closed a business in the previous year had already started another.
The Maker Line records four entries, Started, Made, Closed and Made Again, so that a founder reads her own record as a sequence and chooses on purpose what her next business is for.

What the movers-to-makers frame counts

The book is an edited CRC Press volume of nine chapters, compiled by Manleenjot Kaur, Melissa Hyunh and Tilottama Singh. Its preface explains the title: women who began American journeys “as spouses, students, or job-seekers” became makers “of companies, code, communities, careers, and change.” The editors deserve credit for widening the definition of making past company formation. A career, a research group and a community count too.

The evidence, though, comes almost entirely from the far end of the journey. Chapter 3 sent questionnaires to 40 Indian self-initiated expatriates in the United States, Singapore and Australia, of whom 18 were women and 15 lived in the United States. Every respondent was still working abroad at the time of answering, and the authors call their sample “very small” and the study a pilot. Chapter 6 interviewed ten migrant women entrepreneurs in Italy and reports two of them. Most of the remaining chapters are personal narratives, advice and case studies written from the far side of the move.

A portrait teaches how one woman arrived. A count teaches how often women arrive, and that requires the women who went home, closed the business or stopped answering. Chapter 7’s authors see the risk in their own method: “Without structural transformation, women’s individual success stories risk being treated as symbolic rather than catalytic.” Their remedy is policy. The prior step is a denominator, because a founder who measures herself against portraits measures herself against the winners of a draw whose other tickets stay out of view.

What our own published numbers can say

AVODA’s public figures are 1,247+ applied, 600+ trained and 100+ startups supported, across 18 programs in three countries. Set beside the frame, they answer less than it asks. The book’s journey starts with a move, and none of our five figures records where a founder started, whether she crossed a border or a district, or her gender. The mover half of the frame is outside them entirely.

The maker half has one count. In Who Actually Finishes we published a drop-out split from 99 alumni: 15% registered, 25% informal, 45% without a business. The split reports what alumni told us and covers those who answered. It carries no gender breakdown. It is also a status on one date. It says where each respondent stood when asked, and it is silent on where she stood a year before or will stand a year later.

That last property sets the limit on any reading against the frame. The book’s arrow runs one way, from mover to maker. A status on one date fits that arrow only if making, once reached, tends to stay reached. In East Africa it often does the reverse.

Making in Uganda runs in loops

Arthur Sserwanga and Gerrit Rooks studied 737 entrepreneurs in Kampala and the rural district of Mpigi, drawn at random from household lists, with a response rate of 99.3%. Of those 737, 113, or 16%, had already shut down a business before the one they were running. Their paper also reports the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor figures for Uganda: about 30% of businesses failed in 2003 to 2004, about the same in 2009 to 2010, and among people who had closed a business in the previous twelve months, 57% intended to start a new one within three years and 37.5% had already done so.

Kenya shows the same churn at national scale. Capital FM, reporting the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics MSME survey of 2016, gave 2.2 million closures over the five years to 2016. Establishments started or acquired within the previous two years made up 61.3% of the closures, the average business closed at 3.8 years, and the most common reason was a shortage of operating funds, cited by 30% of closed businesses.

These figures come from other years, other countries and other methods than our split, so they are patterns to read with and offer a benchmark for our 45% only in the loosest sense. The pattern is plain enough. Closing a business is a common event in a founder’s working life here, and starting another soon after is common too. A woman recorded as without a business on the survey date may be between her second and third. A woman recorded as registered may close next quarter for want of operating cash and reopen in a cheaper location.

This is where the American frame transfers least. Its movers make one crossing and then build, with the hubs, employers and capital of a dense economy around them. The founders in our split live in an economy where the crossing repeats: into a business, out of it, and into the next, each time carrying a little more of what the last one taught.

The Maker Line

A founder deciding what her next business is for needs her own history laid out in order. The Maker Line keeps that history as a sequence of four entries, and each entry can repeat.

Started. Where she began and with what: the town, the savings, the skill, the household she supports. This is the mover entry, the one our published figures lack.
Made. Each venture she ran, registered or informal, with what it paid and whom. Write whether it fed the household alone or also paid wages to someone outside it.
Closed. The date each venture ended and the reason, in a sentence: operating cash, a landlord, a buyer lost, a family claim, an illness. This entry teaches the most and is the easiest to leave blank.
Made Again. What changed in the next venture because of the last closure: the price, the location, the product, the partner.

Read through the line, our split looks different. The 45% without a business sits at a Closed entry or before a first Made; the split cannot say which, or how long the gap will last. The 25% informal and the 15% registered sit at a Made entry, and the split cannot say what kind of venture each one is.

For a founder whose first business has closed, the line changes the question she brings to any program. Asking whether she failed puts the whole matter on one date. Asking what the closure taught her, and what the next venture is meant to pay, gives her something she can answer in writing, now, before she decides whether to apply anywhere.

Take an invented founder to see the entries work. She ran a second-hand clothes stall for fourteen months, closed it when bale prices rose and she had no cash buffer, and now plans a smaller stall near a taxi stage with two weeks of stock money set aside first. Her Closed entry names the cause, and her Made Again entry answers it.

Subsistence or transformational: Schoar’s divide

In a 2010 chapter for the National Bureau of Economic Research, Antoinette Schoar of MIT divides entrepreneurs into two groups. Subsistence entrepreneurs run small operations that provide an alternative to employment for the owner and her family and seldom grow. Transformational entrepreneurs build firms that grow and hire. Her finding is that the groups differ in goals, skills and response to policy, and that “only a negligible fraction of entrepreneurs transition from one type to the other.”

If she is right, a restart is often a second subsistence business, the loop is a circle, and any count of founders who “have a business” flatters the program that publishes it. I concede that in full. Our split cannot separate a stall that feeds a family from a firm that will employ twenty, and a Made Again entry may record the same business in a new street.

East African evidence complicates her conclusion. Christopher Blattman and Stefan Dercon randomized job applicants at five Ethiopian firms. Industrial jobs offered steadier hours at low wages, with risky conditions, and most people offered one quit within months. A program of $300 plus business training raised earnings by 33%, and when the barriers to self-employment were eased, applicants preferred it to the factory work. Where the wage alternative is that thin, a business that feeds a household is a considered choice, and it earns its place on the line.

Schoar’s categories still belong on the page. The Made entry asks whom the venture pays, because a founder who wants a transformational firm has to plan for it on purpose, and one who chooses a household business is entitled to plan for that well.

Seek the welfare of the city

Jeremiah’s letter reached the exiles in Babylon, people who were movers by force, and its instruction was ordinary and patient: “Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat their produce.” Then it gave them a measure: “seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile … for in its welfare you will find your welfare.” A few verses later the letter names the length of the stay, seventy years, long enough for many houses to be built, lost and rebuilt. Set that beside the two measures a founder is left holding. Her status on a single date is unreliable because of the loops. The growth test grades a business by whether it hires. Both judge her at one moment by the size of what she holds, and the long middle of a working life goes unrecorded. Jeremiah’s measure is built for that middle. It honors the garden that feeds a household as faithful work, it expects building after loss, and it judges the work by the good it does where the founder lives, at every entry on her line.

Frequently Asked Questions

What happened to AVODA alumni who no longer run a business?

The published split cannot tell. It records 45% of the 99 responding alumni as without a business on the date they answered, and is silent on what came next. Ugandan evidence points to many sitting between ventures: in GEM data, 37.5% of people who had closed a business in the previous year had already started another.

What does AVODA’s alumni outcome data show?

AVODA has published one outcome count: a drop-out split from 99 alumni, 15% registered, 25% informal and 45% without a business. It reports what alumni told us, covers those who answered and has no gender split. It is a status on one date, so it cannot show restarts or what kind of business each founder runs.

How common is it for Ugandan entrepreneurs to close and restart a business?

Common. Global Entrepreneurship Monitor data for 2003 to 2004 put Uganda’s business failure rate near 30%, and 37.5% of people who had closed a business in the previous year had already started another. In a 2014 study of 737 entrepreneurs in Kampala and Mpigi, 16% had shut down an earlier business.

Is a subsistence business a failure?

Antoinette Schoar’s research separates subsistence businesses, which support the owner’s household, from transformational ones that grow and hire, and finds few move between the two. Evidence from Ethiopia shows self-employment can beat the wage jobs on offer. A household business chosen on purpose and run well is a legitimate outcome.

What is the Maker Line?

It is a written record of a founder’s working life with four repeatable entries: Started, Made, Closed and Made Again. It treats a closure as an entry with a cause and a lesson, and asks whom each venture is meant to pay, so she can plan her next business deliberately.

Next Step

Put your Maker Line on paper before you apply to any program, starting with the Closed entry you would most like to skip. Then take the AVODA Business Capability Assessment: about eight minutes on how you would put capital to work and how you know it will pay, with a note from AVODA within a day on where your answers place you. Bringing the line with you lets the next venture answer the last closure, and it can save you a season of opening the same stall again.

Sources and Evidence

Kaur, Hyunh and Singh (eds.), Women in the Technology and Innovation Ecosystem: From Movers to Makers in America, CRC Press, 2026, DOI 10.1201/9781003604402 (publisher page): the book; preface, chapter 3 method and respondent table, chapter 6 method and chapter 7 quoted and checked.
Sserwanga and Rooks, “Cognitive consequences of business shut down: the case of Ugandan repeat entrepreneurs,” International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behavior and Research 20(3), 2014, DOI 10.1108/IJEBR-10-2012-0120: 737 entrepreneurs in Kampala and Mpigi, 113 (16%) repeat entrepreneurs; GEM Uganda failure rates near 30% (2003 to 2004 and 2009 to 2010); 57% intending and 37.5% having restarted.
Capital FM, “Kenya’s 2.2mn SMEs closed shop in the last five years” (October 2016), reporting the KNBS MSME survey: 2.2 million closures in five years; 61.3% of closures among establishments under two years old; closure at 3.8 years on average; 30% citing a shortage of operating funds.
Schoar, “The Divide between Subsistence and Transformational Entrepreneurship,” Innovation Policy and the Economy 10, NBER, 2010: the hostile witness; publication details and abstract.
Schoar, working paper version of the same chapter (MIT): definitions of the two types and the “negligible fraction” finding.
Blattman and Dercon, “The Impacts of Industrial and Entrepreneurial Work on Income and Health: Experimental Evidence from Ethiopia,” American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 10(3), 2018: most job recipients quit within months; $300 plus training raised earnings 33%; applicants preferred self-employment when its barriers were eased.
Jeremiah 29:4 to 10 (ESV), Bible Gateway: “Build houses and live in them”, “in its welfare you will find your welfare” and the seventy years of verse 10.