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

• No reliable lists of MSEs were available;
• Many intermediary organizations such as Chambers of Commerce, business
associations, micro-finance institutions (MFIs) and business development service
(BDS) providers were unwilling to share their client lists because of confidentiality
issues or fears that the researchers would “take” their clients; and
• Those lists that were accessed were frequently out-of-date and incomplete, e.g.,
telephone numbers were missing, wrong addresses given, or they did not contain the
necessary information for selection such as the length of time in business.
All three research teams, but especially the Tanzanian and Zambian teams, adopted
additional strategies for locating relevant women entrepreneurs and used the “snowballing”
technique, where women entrepreneurs already identified were asked to suggest other
women they knew in business who fitted the profile for the survey. These data difficulties,
together with the criteria of the sample and constraints on the timescale for completing the
research, meant that the profile of these women entrepreneurs sampled and interviewed
was inevitably urban-based. The distribution of the survey participants is given in Table 5
below.
Table 5: Location of the survey participants in the three countries
Ethiopia Tanzania Zambia
6 Regional towns 3 Urban centres 2 Urban centres
Addis Ababa 20 Arusha 39 Lusaka 78
Nazareth 20 Dar es Salaam 65 Kitwe 40
Awassa 22 Zanzibar Town 24
Bahir Dar 21
Mekelle 20
Dire Dawa 20
Total No. surveyed 123 Total No. surveyed 128 Total No. surveyed 118
Source: ILO, 2003a ,b and c.
At one of the national conferences, the research was challenged as not being
representative of the majority of women entrepreneurs in each of the three countries, where
the majority of women and hence women entrepreneurs are in rural areas. This was indeed
correct, as the research did not set out to be representative of all women, nor of the
majority of women entrepreneurs in Ethiopia, Tanzania and Zambia. The WED Study
focused on a non-traditional minority, i.e. a group of successful women entrepreneurs
running formal businesses in order to see whether lessons could be learnt from their
experiences.
This more qualitative approach to data collection, surveys, in-depth interviews and
consultation sought to explore in detail and unpack the women entrepreneurs’ experiences
of growth and success. It aimed to capture the detail surrounding successful women
entrepreneurs’ aspirations, motivations and experiences as regards survival and growth, as
well as the issues surrounding their business transition from informal to formal operations.
Lessons from these successful women would then provide some positive role models, and
highlight solutions and ideas for ways in which a larger group of women could develop as
successful entrepreneurs in the three study countries.
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