Critical Factors for the Development of Women Entrepreneurship in Retail Business of Bangladesh

What is it about?

This paper aims at identifying the critical factors related to the development of women entrepreneurship in the retail business sector of Bangladesh. For identifying the factors, 218 women entrepreneurs of retail businesses were interviewed with a structured questionnaire. Both descriptive and inferential statistics were used in this study. Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) was used to identify the relationships between the critical factors and the overall development of women entrepreneurship in the retail business of Bangladesh.

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Why is it important?

Development of women entrepreneurship in the SME sector has a crucial importance in a developing country like Bangladesh where women constitute half of the total population. The majority of them are underprivileged, under nourished, illiterate and poor. Hence, the development of women entrepreneurship has tremendous potentials for transforming the society through socioeconomic empowerment of the women. This potential is remained untapped in Bangladesh because of lower number of women entrepreneurs in business and economic activities. According to the Bangladesh Economic Review 2009, around six percent of the country's $90 billion economy comes from SMEs, which is also the largest sector in terms of employment generation. But the women entrepreneurs are less than ten percent of the total entrepreneurs of the country. However, in the recent years, women entrepreneurship in small retail businesses of the country has been increasing which is a good sign for the positive growth of the economy. Therefore, for the development of women entrepreneurship in retail business sector of Bangladesh, identification of critical factors is highly important.