DRIVERS OF PERFOMANCE OF WOMEN OWNED MICRO AND SMALL ENTERPRISES IN KENYA: A CASE OF EMBAKASI SUB - COUNTY

Abstract

Women owned-income generating Micro and Small Enterprises (MSEs) in Kenya cut across all sectors of the economy, providing a prolific source of employment, income, and government revenue and poverty reduction. The main purpose of this study was to establish drivers of women owned-income generating MSEs in Kenya. The study is built on the entrepreneurial theory, exchange relationships theory, market orientation theory and transactional theory. The target population of this study was 6000 MSEs, in Embakasi sub-county. Primary data was gathered from the questionnaires from the 160 respondents (entrepreneurs/ employees) of MSEs.The secondary data was obtained from published. A pilot study was conducted to pretest the validity and reliability of instruments for data collection. The data was analyzed by use of both qualitative and quantitative methods with the help of Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) version 22 and excel. The multiple regression analysis was adopted to establish the direction and strength of the relationship of the variables at 5% level of significance.The regression analysis shows that there exists a strong positive relationship between the indepedent variables and depedent variable as shown by R value (0.882) the coefficient of determination (R²) is between zero and one the high R square is 0.776. The regression analysis also show that entrepreneurial training had the strongest positive (Pearson correlation coefficient =.888; p-value = .000< .05) influence on performance of women MSEs. In addition, financial accessibility, technological capacity and government policy and regulation were positively correlated to performance of women MSEs with Pearson correlation coefficient of .785, .643 and .599 with p-values of .006<0.05, .008<0.05 and .009<0.05 respectively. The study established that entrepreneurial training is the most significant factor. The results of t-test show t-values for independent variables have a significance level of the values of less than 0.05. Thus study concluded that the independent variables had significant positive impact on the performance of women MSEs. Further, F-test was done to test the effect of independent variables on the dependent variable simultaneously. Based on the study results of the ANOVA Test or F-test, obtained F-count was 71.4914 greater the F-critical (8.8765) with significance of 0.000. Since the significance level of 0.000< 0.05 it was concluded that the set of independent variables affect the performance of women MSEs and this shows that the overall model was significant.The study was limited to internal and external variables affecting performance of women MSEs. Further study can be the methods to explore the other variables which could be affecting performance of women MSEs in other areas for the generalization of the findings of this study but more focus should be on qualitative measures of performance of women MSEs.

Key Words: Entrepreneurial Training, Financial Accessibility, Technological Capacity, Government Policy and Regulations, Performance of Mses in Kenya.