Factors Affecting The Performance Of Rural Women Entrepreneurship In Bangladesh

In the 21 st century,women entrepreneurs play a vital role in the global economy.Cell phones have become a very important part of our daily lives as well as running businesses.There is a growing interest of women entrepreneurs using mobile phone for business activities.But through this,it is not possible to identify the real picture of women entrepreneurship in Bangladesh.We didn’t find any research work which was conducted in relation to problems of women entrepreneurship.Yet,a few researches have been done on women entrepreneurship of Bangladesh.Moreover,this study is principally an attempt to investigate the obstacles that women face in doing business in rural Bangladesh to become a successful entrepreneur,identify the factors that influence women to use mobile phone for their business and document the effect of multiple barriers on their business performance and make recommendations for the SME Foundation to support women in this areas for running their business smoothly.Based on the literature review,eight hypothesizes were developed to support the proposed conceptual framework.To fulfill the objectives this study adopted a mixed-methods research strategy.Data has been collected from 522 respondents by using convenient sampling across the three districts of Bangladesh to supplement the quantitative evidences.A questionnaire was designed five point Likert scales for answering the basic questions.JASP used to analyze collected data.A number of statistical analyses were performed to satisfy the objectives.The descriptive statistics,correlation and regression analysis were carried out to identify the important determinants of success of women entrepreneurs.From the results of regression analysis found that,market and network,family,and financial are the essential factors,which significantly affect business performance of women entrepreneurs.Results show among all type of entrepreneurships,financial barriers ranked 1st,except tailoring and handloom.For tailoring and handloom entrepreneurs,self-motivation is the main barrier through self-motivation ranked 2nd for the overall enterprise.Market communication,policy,socio-cultural and family barriers ranked 3rd,4th,5th and 6th respectively.The multiple linear regression analysis identified the determinants of mobile phone use by women entrepreneurs.Out of 11 independent variables,five explanatory variables,i.e.,education,socio-cultural barriers,market and communication,family attributes,and financial barriers were statistically significant positive influences on business performance(p < 0.05).On the other hand,market and communication barriers were reported as below 1% level of significance.We also found that women entrepreneurs significantly use the cell phone to reduce their market and communication barriers.On an average mobile phone user had a higher level of business performance.The mediation analysis suggests that all of the barriers had non-significant negative impacts on business performance.Among the factors,financial barriers have the most individual effect on the dependent variables we considered.It is evident that mobile phones significantly contribute to reduce the existing barriers of women entrepreneurship and also help in enhancing business performance.The influence of the government is still very essential for the development of business conditions of the rural women in rural areas of Bangladesh.Therefore,the study suggested having appropriate measures to reduce the financial barriers.More importantly,tax,the tariff on using mobile phone for business purposes should be reduced particularly for women entrepreneurs considering,they are lacking compared to male.The research is revealed that women entrepreneur,face a range of challenges,including financial,lack of access to funds and networking.These challenges can be addressed through targeted government policies including,allocation of sufficient funds to support women entrepreneurs.Thus,the limitation of this research is that it focuses only on the barriers facing women entrepreneurs who are available in the three districts,indicating a very small research sample size,so different results may be obtained when the model is tested in other countries.In addition,most of the respondents in this study were involved with similar types of businesses consequently generalizability cannot be made.It will act as a guide to assist them to determine what factors should be relevant for them.However,this study offers some practical recommendation toward improving policy supports for developing women entrepreneurs.