Socioeconomic Factors of Women Entrepreneurship Development in Bangladesh

Abstract

There is a paramount importance of women entrepreneurship development for the economic development of a developing country like Bangladesh. But the development this entrepreneurship depends on consolidated effort of the policymakers and the people of the country. This development of women entrepreneurship primarily depends on the positive environmental factors of the country such as, social, economic, legal, political, technological etc. factors that influence their activities of their entrepreneurial businesses. Among these factors, socio-economic factors are the major factors influencing the women entrepreneurship development in Bangladesh. Over the past couple of years, women entrepreneurs of Bangladesh acquired a large number of companies, both offline and online in nature. They have created employments by introducing new jobs in the job market. The identification of socioeconomic factors for the development of women entrepreneurship is very important in the socioeconomic conditions of Bangladesh. Hence, this study deals with the factors that affect the development of women entrepreneurship in Bangladesh. The study adopted a self-administered questionnaires and interviews with women entrepreneurs engaged in diverse business sectors. A total number of 201 women small women entrepreneurs in different businesses were interviewed. A structured questionnaire was designed to collect the relevant information from the respondent women entrepreneurs. Both descriptive and inferential statistics were used to analyze the collected data. Multivariate analysis techniques were used to identify the factors having influence on the development of women entrepreneurship in Bangladesh. The findings of the study show that there are eight socioeconomic factors of women entrepreneurship development in Bangladesh such as, availability of SME authority services, maintaining variety quality products, difficulty in sourcing start-up capital, public relationship, problems of family and gender discrimination, availability of training centers, availability of service tools and available supply of raw materials. This study suggest that the policymakers should focus more the factors like availability of SME authority services, difficulty in sourcing start-up capital, problems of family and gender discrimination and available supply of raw materials in order to development women entrepreneurship in Bangladesh.