Cultural Dimensions And Perfomance Of Women’s Entrepreneurial Initiatives: A Case Of Mvomero District, Tanzania

ABSTACT

This study examined the influence of cultural dimensions on performance of women’s entrepreneurial initiatives in Mvomero District. Specifically the study aimed to; examine variations of cultural dimensions between men and women in the study area, asses differential performance of women’s and men’s owned entrepreneurial enterprises, examine the influence of cultural dimensions on growth of women’s entrepreneurial enterprises and identify the best predictor of women’s performance of entrepreneurial enterprises. A sample of 115 including both women and men entrepreneurs engaged in different entrepreneurial activities was taken for the study using stratified and simple random sampling. The Mann Whitney U-test was used to examine the variation of cultural dimensions between men and women. The results of the study indicate that there were no variations of cultural dimension between men and women in the study area. Independent sample t-test was employed to asses differential performance of women’s and men owned entrepreneurial enterprises. The results show that the business performance between men and women in the study area had no significant difference. To examine the influence of cultural dimensions on performance of women’s entrepreneurial enterprises multiple linear regressions was used. The results found that among three cultural dimensions only two dimensions namely masculinity and uncertainty avoidance recorded significant influence on performance with masculinity recording high influence on performance thus suggesting the best predictor of entrepreneurial performance compared to uncertainty avoidance and collectivism. The study recommended that to empower women on entrepreneurial performance, the government should chart out extra strategies for entrepreneurial awareness and trainings, education especially in rural areas who mostly seem to end with standard seven certificate and below, and loans for capital. These might be realized by development practitioners in a period of time so that to increase the number of women in the entrepreneurial arena as far as there is no variation on entrepreneurial performance between men and women.