Diagnosing Barriers to Entrepreneurship and Assessing the Chances for Implementing Reform

It is important to stress that this tool frames and guides the analytical and assessment process. In this respect, it can be used to identify problems and possible solutions, and map the environment in which reforms would be implemented. While in the assessment phase this tool will yield possible policy solutions, this is not the intended function. This tool will not generate ready-made solutions that, once mechanically applied, automatically produce optimal conditions. Desirable reforms will need to be drawn from local perceptions corroborated with expert analysis and historical and comparative conclusions and matched with broader USAID goals. Once these solutions are conceived, this tool provides a technique that helps the process of understanding their chances for being implemented. This tool will produce the best results when paired with complementary techniques such as broadbased quantitative analysis. The richness of information this tool helps capture is invaluable to any effort at reform, however, by its very nature, it limits the number of individuals tracked. Given this, it is useful to triangulate the information gathered herein with other sources to ensure consistency in overall trends. If inconsistency is found, this needs to be explored to determine if the error lies with the outside data, or if efforts using this diagnostic tool need to be improved.