Women in small-scale businesses : opportunities and constriants of small-scale business women in Kumbo, Northwest Province of Cameroon

Abstract

ABSTRACT

When economic structures fail to provide wage opportunities, women must rely on their own initiatives for generating incomes. More and more, women are drawn and driven to the creation and management of their own enterprises. Worldwide, the number of enterprises owned by women is growing, in some countries at a faster pace than the economy as a whole. In many LDCs, where structural adjustment programmes and privatization policies have diminished women’s opportunities for wage employment, women have increasingly become self-employed and owners and managers of micro-enterprises as well as SMEs. Rapid growth of women’s self-employment and entrepreneurship confirms that this is an important avenue to improve women’s employability. This avenue is widely recognizable at the global level. It is part of the recommendation of the Beijing platform for Action, the Monterrey Consensus and the Millennium Development Goals in the context addressing gender equality, poverty alleviation and sustainability of economic growth and development. The conditions under which they become self-employed or start a small business, where they are located in the market geographically and financially, what types of establishment they run, whether they differ from other women in terms of personal characteristics and how their experiences compared to men’s are all areas requiring research. In this era of trade liberalization and global integration, to ensure that inequality does not increase and that poverty decreases, more attention needs to be paid to micro-enterprises-especially those run by women. This thesis discusses some of the small-scale businesses carried out by women in Kumbo, the opportunities they have and some of the major constraints they face which inhibits their growth.