The Role of Sub City level leaders on Micro and Small Enterprises Development in Addis Ababa City Administration

No Thumbnail Available

Date

2019

Journal Title

Journal ISSN

Volume Title

Publisher

Addis Ababa University

Abstract

Micro and small enterprises are seen as an emerging private sector, forming the basis for private sector led growth by providing employment, alleviating poverty, ensuring food security, and private sector development. Practically, the increasing rate of unemployment, the gap between the rich and the poor, corruption and good governance problems need leader’s intervention. The purpose of this study was to investigate the role of leaders in MSEs development and fill the gap in the city administration. This study employed a descriptive survey research design. As the scope covers all the ten sub-cities of Addis, six offices those were responsible for the development of MSEs purposely selected and represented by their heads, professional experts, Women associations, youth forum and council representatives who participate on the work were involved and three enterprises heads and one of their members were reflected their view on the roles of leaders on the development of micro and small enterprises. The sample comprised a total of 191 respondents. Primary data were collected through questionnaire, interview, and focus group discussion while the secondary data was collected from performance reports. Findings revealed that local economic development which was used as an approach in the city administration, has given due attention to the importance of proactive management in the development of micro and small enterprises. As a result, all of the leaders in the sub cities were striving to succeed in the development frame set and majority of them had achieved better on financial support, working and selling area provision and market development. But there are gaps on entrepreneurship and enterprise development, one window shopping service center development, industry extension service development and institutional capacity development in order to realize the development of MSEs. Based on the findings, the study concluded that there were internal and external constraining challenges that hinder the leaders` performance. These challenges arise from the enterprises, Some others from stakeholders and still from the leaders themselves. The critical challenges those arise from all parties were mainly because of the attitude they have and some of them might be related to knowledge, technology and skills of all stakeholders. Therefore, the city administration should build the capacity of the leaders to make them play their roles in all aspects and the leaders should identify their gaps, plan them in priorities to take appropriate actions to their context. Finally leaders have to play key roles in coordinating all the stakeholders as well as national and local partners to come up with successful enterprises that can contribute to the local economy and sustainable economic development at large.

Description

Keywords

Citation