Women Entrepreneurship in Tanzania : Entry and performance barriers

The overall objective of this study, was to identify social, cultural and economic factors that hinder or limit women's entry into entrepreneurship in Tanzania and those that adversely affect their performance. A survey of 43 women entrepreneurs was conducted through a questionnaire, which was personally administered. A case study on the business start-up history of one successful woman entrepreneur was also included in the study. The finding of the study revealed that women participated in low demand and service-oriented activities that were often prone to horizontal expansion. Their choice of activities, growth strategies, recruitment practices and reinvestment policies were all household-centred rather than business-centred. The result is that most of the activities were gender typed. Analysis of the factors that led to the above entrepreneurial behaviour and hence their poor performance is business suggests that socio-cultural gender biases, prejudices, practices and the generally lack of gender-sensitive industrial policies are the main critical factors. Socio-cultural practices have led to an unequal division of labour to the disadvantage of women. This has led to women's multiple roles which have in turn engendered women's poor performance in business. It has been alluded to, in this report, that any interventions geared toward promoting female entrepreneurship should address both, strategic and practical needs. Structural needs that would encompass a re-orientation of the economic policy and the industrial policy should also be addressed. A successful way of identifying the strategic and practical needs of women should focus on the various entrepreneurial behaviours of woman. Future research should investigate on the factors that determine growth of female entrepreneurship. Longitudinal data may reveal a trend in constraints to female entrepreneurship in Tanzania that this study was not able to uncover. Since barriers to female entrepreneurship may change over time a clearer picture of the factors that influence growth of female entrepreneurship needs to come into focus.