The Challenges of Growing Small Businesses - International Labour ...

2. Perspectives on women’s enterprise in
some African countries
The aim of the secondary research element of the WED Study was to review and
build on previous research, to highlight key findings about women’s entrepreneurship, and
to identify critical gaps in understanding about the factors which help or hinder women
entrepreneurs. Three preliminary reports were produced on the main themes arising from
the secondary research in each of the countries (see JUDAI, 2002; UDEC, 2002; and
Zewde & Associates, 2002). Common themes that emerged from the work, as well as the
key questions that the research raised for the primary fieldwork, are examined in this
section using the Sustainable Livelihoods approach and its five levels of analysis, as in the
conceptual framework adopted for this study, i.e. (i) the individual woman entrepreneur
and her access to and ownership of assets; (ii) her engagement with enterprise; (iii) her
access to and use of the support sector in developing her enterprise; (iv) the impact of the
enabling environment policies, structures and processes, and (v) the influence of the socioeconomic
context in which the women live and operate their enterprises.
2.1 A partial picture?
A key challenge in trying to build a simple descriptive picture or profile of women as
business owners within each country was the paucity of current or recent data beyond
small sample groups of specific types of women entrepreneurs. This lack of data has two
dimensions – that concerning MSEs in general, and that specifically relating to women
entrepreneurs.
Statistics on women and men entrepreneurs in micro and small enterprises (MSEs)
are difficult to produce for at least two reasons. First, because there is a lack of a clear
definition of what is meant by an “entrepreneur”, who can be the owner of the business or
the operator of the business, and there can be more than one entrepreneur in the same
business, e.g., such as in the case of a husband and wife running a family business on an
equal footing. The second reason relates to the difficulty that measurement methodologies
have in actually identifying MSE entrepreneurs even if a clear operational definition exists.
Two approaches are used to measure MSE entrepreneurs. When the research interest
is to identify the entrepreneurs themselves and describe their characteristics, some
difficulty lies in adequately identifying them as entrepreneurs, i.e., as the actual owners or
operators of their business. Disaggregation by sex is rarely a problem in this case, but
underestimation is. Unless very careful questions are used to obtain this information, it is
likely that women entrepreneurs will be overlooked by statistics to a greater extent than
men. This arises because they may not be considered by others – nor might they consider
themselves – as “owning or managing a business”, even when that is exactly what they do.
When the research interest is to identify the business and how it operates, the
difficulty lies in identifying the actual MSE units. Usually, the methodologies used to
obtain this type of information require the creation and maintenance of databases or
directories of MSEs, but these establishments tend to have a high turnover and this makes
it practically impossible to carry out adequately. Using this approach leads to a significant
underestimation of MSEs, and it is also quite probable that MSEs run by women will be
overlooked by statistics to a greater extent that MSEs run by men, because they may tend
to be smaller and more “invisible”, for example, for businesses carried out at home or in
the street, without an independent and fixed structure that identifies them as such.
Disaggregation by sex can also be a problem, if the data collection methodology is not
designed to capture information about the sex of the entrepreneur.
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