An Evaluation of the Effectiveness of Business Development Service Providers and Their Services for Micro and Small Enterprise Sustainability in Bungoma County, Kenya

Résumé

This paper evaluated effectiveness of the business development services (BDS) providers and their services for Micro and Small Enterprises’ (MSEs) sustainability in Bungoma County, Kenya. Author argues that in spite of the hyped perception that entrepreneurial process can be actualized by all and sundry as long as they have the push and pull traits to take risks, business development services offering remains critical in the continuity of MSEs. Whereas several studies have been carried out to address MSEs’ failure rates and boost their sustainability attributed to among others, limited access to finance, markets and a hostile legal and regulatory framework, failure rate has remained over 70 % before the threshold of three and half years. Moreover, focus of such interventions has been on provision mechanisms with minimal initiatives being targeted on anticipation and coping with adversity mechanisms.  The study identified various business development services (BDS) providers and evaluated effectiveness of their services for MSEs’ sustainability as rated by MSEs owner-managers. The discussion is based primarily on a systematic literature review of packaging of business development services, owner-managers’ self-evaluation on common hazards threatening enterprise sustainability with a view to appraise their preparedness to address them for survival based on BDS offering. The models reviewed to reflect past studies and form part of the study’s conceptual underpinning were integrative model of entrepreneurial inputs and outcomes, flexible specialization model of enterprise development and disaster crunch model. The study was conducted in Bungoma County, Kenya and that a multi-phase sample size of 384 MSEs was used for the study. The target population was 78,691 MSEs’ owner-managers. Cross-sectional survey design was employed. The sampling strategy involved multi-phase, stratified and purposive sampling. The principal instrument employed in the primary data collection was questionnaires. However, document analyses and direct observations were also done to enrich author’s perspective. Descriptive statistics were employed to analyze data with main focus being usage of cross tabulation. The study concludes that consistent with previous studies, BDS services are still far from being packaged to fill the needs of micro and small micro and small entrepreneurs hence not effective in their current offering. Similarly, BDS providers’ focus is on their product sustainability rather than on their significant impact on MSEs’ sustainability. The study noted a higher rate of female micro and small entrepreneurs who have accessed BDS generally compared to male micro and small entrepreneurs. This is agreeable with ongoing global trends that target female micro and small entrepreneurs. Holistic sustainability anchored on the three dimensions should therefore be encouraged among MSEs and be enforced through BDS offering given varied susceptibility of MSEs to hazards and disaster impacts.