According to an April 2020 research study: “Challenges and Opportunities for Women Entrepreneurs in Botswana: Revisiting the Role of Entrepreneurship Education” done and authored by Norman Rhudumbu, EC (Elize) du Plessis and Cosmas Maphosa, they found that women entrepreneurs faced a web of challenges among which were access to finance, lack of training leading to a lack of technical skills, lack of knowledge of sources of financing and technical support, high competition in the market, marginalization of women and lack of knowledge of marketing strategies.
The key findings of the study were that while women entrepreneurs faced a number of challenges, the legal and regulatory framework was highly conducive and supportive of women entrepreneurship and also that customized entrepreneurship education and training offered opportunities for women entrepreneurs to enhance their knowledge and technical skills.
The practical implications of the study are that women entrepreneurs need more training in business entrepreneurship for them to gain more knowledge and skills; finance houses become more accommodating to women entrepreneurship they could help in empowerment of these people as they show potential in their businesses; and if more pro-women entrepreneurship policies are developed, they could enhance the activities of women entrepreneurs.
The research emphasizes that it is possible that women can perform as much as men in business if given the necessary support.
Entrepreneurship in general in Botswana is viewed as very critical to economic growth and the eradication of poverty. As a result, there is much support given to women entrepreneurs in Botswana through various policy frameworks.
At a global level, Botswana ranks second to Uganda at 34.6 percent of the MasterCard Index in terms of women entrepreneurship activity rate and first in Africa at 66 percent in women advancement index and also first in Africa at 62.6 percent on providing supportive entrepreneurship conditions to women.
It has also been found by other previous studies that52.6 percent of women are employed in the formal economy, with 75 percent of these women are more likely to start their own businesses. Such statistics help to show that there is certainly a lot of appetite by women to start and successfully run their own businesses if it were not for the challenges they face in the business environment.
Despite offering multiple and varied benefits to the entrepreneurship sector, women entrepreneurs continue to be viewed as an insignificant factor in entrepreneurship due to the dominance of the male entrepreneurs.
Women entrepreneurship is a critical empowerment and emancipation tool in terms of the improvement of the quality of life for women. There is no doubt that women entrepreneurship is growing, despite the fact that this growth is affected by a complex web of micro-level and macro-level variables. Women make up a big chunk of the global population and 40 percent of the global workforce, yet they continue to be underrepresented in critical areas of the national economies. Other statistics show that women constitute more than a third of all formal businesses in the global economy.
Some scholars have even asserted that women-owned and led business ventures are strong catalysts for economic growth at a global level.
In the context of Botswana, entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship education are considered very strategic economic activities that have attracted the attention of many of the nation’s policymakers and educators.
Such recognition of the critical role entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship education p[lay in the growth of the economy has led to the establishment of clear policy frameworks and programmes to catalyze and enhance the development of the spirit of entrepreneurship among citizens in general and women in particular.
This recognition of the critical role of entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship education has led to the development and implementation of entrepreneurship programmes in higher education institutions in Botswana. More specifically, the entrepreneurship policy framework in the country finds expression through the establishment of various facilitating government agencies like the Citizen Entrepreneurial Development Agency (CEDA), The Local Enterprise Authority (LEA), Botswana Investment and Trade Centre(BITC) and the National Development Bank (NDB) as well as the Botswana Development Corporation (BDC).
A woman entrepreneur is defined as a woman who initiates, creates and runs a business venture and is prepared to take risks. This is a woman who identifies potentially profitable economic opportunities, initiates a new business, actively participates in managing it and owns at least 50 percent of the business that should have been in operation for at least one year.
The paper, flowing from available literature also argues that raising funds to initiate or run a business continues to be a challenge for women entrepreneurs owing to the fact that most lending institutions require collateral. It is further argued that women entrepreneurs continue to be marginalized and not taken seriously in most sectors of the economy from customers to suppliers. This challenge is exacerbated by the fact that due to cultural issues many women are not in possession of their personal assets to be able to use them as collateral to access funding.
Studies also show that the majority of women have inferior education that makes it difficult for them to have knowledge of sources of funding available and how to access such funding through sound business plans. As a result of negative perceptions of women entrepreneurs as lacking seriousness, women often get limited opportunities to access credit when compared to men; hence, they tend to resort to their meagre personal savings and family loans to finance their businesses, and this results in inadequate stocking and re-stocking of supplies.
Studies show that traditional belief systems such as the male – female role definition that suggest that the subordination of women to men robs them of opportunities for leadership roles, self-confidence and self-expression all of which have negative ramifications to women when they want to stand on their own in business.
And a result of the fact that cultural boundaries, women are averse to taking up decision-making roles in the families, women grow up with low self-esteem of themselves and with high levels of fear of failure. Also, the importance of entrepreneurship education in capacitating women entrepreneurs cannot be overemphasized.
It has been shown in separate studies that many women entrepreneurs lack entrepreneurial knowledge and technical skills due to the fact that they had limited opportunities for vocational and technical education and training in entrepreneurship for a sector which has always been believed to be for men. This has resulted in a void in women with regards to hands-on knowledge and skills to be able to run effectively their businesses.
The balance between work and home commitments is another challenge affecting women entrepreneurs. The success of women entrepreneurs is often compromised by their attempts to balance work and home commitments especially in terms time allocation and very few women can devote most of their time and energies to their businesses as compared to their families.
The work-family interface demands associated with running a business and managing home responsibilities tend to seriously restrict the growth potential of many women-owned business ventures. At the same time, lack of access to information communication technology that includes gadgets such as computers, internet, video-conferencing and others to ensure smooth business communication with stakeholders and quicken business transactions, as well as enabling easy access, storage and retrieval of critical business data continues to be a challenge for women entrepreneurs.
Lack of both access to as well as knowledge of how to use these gadgets leave women entrepreneurs with the challenges of keeping pace with the viability of their ventures. As a result of no training in entrepreneurship education, most of the women entrepreneurs face challenges with regard to how to effectively market their products and services. On the other hand, limited to lack of family support is another barrier to women success in their business ventures.
Entrepreneurship education can therefore capacitate women entrepreneurs with a number of networking strategies they can use to improve the visibility of their businesses to the market.
