Influence of Non-governmental Organisation Programmes on the Performance of Women Micro and Small Enterprises in Mt Elgon Constituency, Bungoma County

Abstract

Non-Governmental Organizations among other groups have come up with programmes to help alleviate the constraints that women entrepreneurs face by providing funds, training and business counseling. However there is no sufficient empirical data to show the extent to which these interventions have brought change to the performance of women run enterprises. Due to this gap this study was aimed at investigating the influence of NGOs' program in empowering women run micro and small enterprises in Mt. Elgon constituency, Kenya. This research study was based on the following objectives: to investigate the influence of training, funding, provision of Agricultural inputs and provision of marketing services by NGOs on the performance of women micro and small enterprises in Mt Elgon. It employed the cross-sectional research design whereby data was collected from a given sample of the research population and then the collected data was used to describe the general population at that time. The target population was 860 women entrepreneurs in Mt. Elgon constituency. The sample size was 258 women MSEs as determined by the Cochran (1977) sampling formula. Questionnaires were used for the data collection. The research utilized descriptive analysis of each of the questions asked in the questionnaire. The findings indicated NGO support provided to women micro enterprises in terms of training, provision of funds, agriculture inputs and creating more market opportunities enhances the growth of their enterprises. The study also found out that majority of women received training in Human resource management and marketing and these enhanced increased sales and improved managerial and leadership skills; majority of them had received funding from NGOs and these led to the general increase in the level of growth; the provision of agricultural input like pesticides and seeds increased their produce; and that the entrepreneurs were able to venture into new business and sell more goods due to marketing services provided by NGOs. The study therefore recommends more training, funding, and market opportunities to those women enterprises which have not yet received the support. Moreover, the involved stakeholders for instance government should intervene and assist NGO in provision of the aforementioned support to women enterprises There researcher recommends that the levels of funding to be increased, the time of training to be increased and especially in areas crucial to the running of enterprises like computer applications and that they provide opportunities for marketing of the products locally and internationally.