Contribution Of Small And Medium Enterprises Owned Women In Generating Employment Opportunity In Rwanda

Women owned Small and Medium enterprises(SMEs) have been increasingly becoming important economic actors in the struggle for development within most of African countries following the economic crises of 1980’s and 1990s’ as a means of ensuring reforms; and it has forced many people to engage in income generating activities to counter for their deteriorating life standards.Rwanda, a developing country, has recently witnessed the role of women in the country re-building and rehabilitation after the 1994 genocide. Most men were killed others enrolled in the army, letting women, a big number of whom widowed throughout this tragic moment, to take care of their families on their own. Their only and one way of self-sustenance was through income generating activities, small and medium enterprises creation being the main channel to success.After genocide, the Rwandan government, in the struggle to the country life recovery in all sectors as well as the long term development e stablishment, has supported and reinforced entrepreneurship through small and medium enterprises(SMEs), where different efforts such as putting in place SMEs support organs and related elaborated policies through which the so called Centre for Promotion of Small and Medium Enterprises of Rwanda(CAPMER) was established. This concept was also included and considerably supported through different national timely and long-term development strategies, EDPRS and Vision 2020, to say the least. However, the count rywide spread high unemployment rate issue kept on worsening, and this paradox brought the researcher to study and analyze the contribution of the so far created women-owned SMEs in the national run to eradicate unemployment.Moreover, it is very important that the existing women-owned SMEs continue to survive and develop; therefore, an analysis of this nature would as well help to bare facts about their daily operations and mostly met complications, where the associated effect to the enterprise job creatio n ability can be studied, possibly leading tonew information that may be helpful to SMEs or any other implicated parties.Women-owned SMEs Challenges would be generally classified as internal and external. The internal level constitutes the accounted comp lications within the enterprise in its daily operations and they can range from the employee to employer sub-levels. The external part is composed of three elements viz social, financial, and legal issues. One of the major challenges faced by women-owned small and medium enterprises in Rwanda is the access to financial resources, especially for small enterprises that often face a problem of insufficiency of collateral security to access substantial amount of money to expand their business operations. Anothe r problem faced would be high taxation when compared with their incomesDifferent interventions have been so far noted from the government and other national as well as international organizations to tackle these issues together with internal ones which wo uld, if successfully implemented, suppress different barriers, the unskilled labor force and low quality product development, among others. In this paper, a study about the women-owned SMEs contribution to the employment generation in Rwanda, as well as t heir influencing parameters, is presented; where in order to get an idea on this approach timely progress, the time interval between year 2011 and 2014 was considered.