Accessibility of Financial Credit and the Growth of Women Owned Small Retail Enterprises in Uasin Gishu County

Abstract

Women in the world account the highest economic growth through the economic activities they engage in.  Even though women entrepreneurs in Kenya have been known to engage in small scale retail enterprises, there has been a need to grow their businesses beyond the current level. However, hindering factors such as lower academic standards, higher interest rates, low income from these businesses and socio-cultural constraints have contributed to poor growth and management of these businesses. Access to credit by these women has also been hampered by these factors. The study investigated the challenges of access to credit on the growth of women owned enterprises in Kapseret constituency, Uasin Gishu County. Use of questionnaires and interview schedules to collect primary data was preferred in this study.  The study adopted a descriptive survey research design. It targeted women entrepreneurs in Kapseret constituency and the management of various micro-finance institutions in the region. A total of 1468 women entrepreneurs were  targeted which is the total number of women identified to have small scale business enterprises in the region operating as small enterprises. The desired sample size was identified using the Morgan and Krejcie Table for Determining Sample Sizes where the sample size comprised of 306 respondents. SPSS was used to code and enter data for analysis. The study adopted both the qualitative and quantitative analysis in order to achieve the objective of the study where the former used descriptive statistics where graphs, tables and pie charts has been used. This research used quantitative analysis to analyze collected data. The study also employed descriptive methods such as means, mode and median. The study established that education levels affects access to credit by women entrepreneurs and interest rate affects access to credit by women entrepreneurs,

Keywords. women entrepreneurs , micro-finance institutions , Financial Credit , Growth,  Small Retail Enterprises