SMME Crisis Resilience: A Snap Literature Review of the COVID-19 Era

Abstract

This paper is a snap literature review on the crisis resilience of small and medium enterprises (SMMEs) during the COVID-19 pandemic. SMMEs are considered significant drivers of economic activity in both the developed and developing worlds. It is therefore important to keep an eye on what goes on in the SMME sector in the interest of preserving them as well as enhancing their performance thereby ensuring their continued contribution to economic activity. The recent COVID-19 pandemic provides an appropriate proxy for examining various business and management aspects, including SMME crisis resilience. This study examined sources, mainly peer reviewed journal papers, from around the world, focusing on determining the nature of challenges experienced by SMMEs during COVID-19, the crisis resilience strategies employed, and their effectiveness. This provided an evidence-based starting point for the formulation of robust recommendations to promote the building of resilience into SMMEs anywhere. The study found that the least researched contexts of SMME resilience are industry-specific, African, and the developing world. Additionally, SMMEs were found to be generally vulnerable to various challenges during crises. During COVID-19, SMMEs responded by adopting different strategies which were effective to varying degrees based on context-specific factors such as access, policies, and regulations. Consequently, more context-specific empirical resilience studies are needed especially in the least researched contexts like Africa and the developing word.

Keywords: SMME, crisis resilience, resilience strategy, challenges, strategy effectiveness, COVID-19.

DOI: 10.7176/EJBM/16-5-08

Publication date: June 30th 2024