Portsmouth Business School
Dr. Umar Mustapha
Entrepreneurship and Economic Development: An Investigation into Small and Medium Enterprises: Opportunity Identification, Creation, Success and Failure in Five African Countries
Department: Accounting and Finance
Email: mustapha@ecnx.net
Nationality: Nigerian
Director of Studies: Professor Mike Page
Year of graduation: 2010
Thesis summary
Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) creation is an important factor that drives developing world economies. Curiously, African SMEs, while being significant in number, tend to be insignificant in terms of contribution to GDP. Overall, they contribute only 1% to GDP growth on an annual basis. Further, the creation and operation of SMEs in Africa appears to be continually stifled by both intrinsic and extrinsic factors. The study use quantitative and qualitative methods to investigate determinants of SME success and failure in five African countries namely Nigeria, Ghana, Mali, Egypt and Zambia. The study also investigates the characteristics of successful and unsuccessful African entrepreneurs within the five selected countries. The methodology chosen was a mixed methods approach. The mixed approach used found significant results with respect to the goals of the research.