Effects of Credit Management Practices on Performance of Women Owned SMEs in Morogoro Municipality, Tanzania

Abstract

This paper determined the effects of credit management practices on the performance of women owned SMEs in Morogoro Municipality. Data were collected from 120 women which included both credit and non-credit recipients. A purposeful sampling procedure was employed to select the study district and three wards whereby two streets were selected from each ward randomly. The women’s respondents were then selected randomly from each street. Descriptive analysis was used to compute the enterprise performance status of the respondents. The results indicate that 55 percent of the women respondents were credit beneficiaries while 45 percent were not. Among those who received credit, 68 percent used the whole credit to invest in the same business; about 21 percent used 50 percent of the credit received to invest in other businesses besides the core ones and about 50 percent used the credit in non-business purposes. Moreover, about 11 percent of the credit recipients used the whole loan given (100%) in other activities such as family parties and paying school fees. An independent t-test was run to determine whether there is a significance difference in performance among women with and without credits. The performance indicators were all significant in terms of asset value, number of employees, monthly sales, and gross margin at p>0.05. The findings show that credit availability influenced the performance of women owning SMEs. The findings also show further that women who received credit and invest the whole of it in the same business were performing better compared to non-credit recipients. It is therefore concluded that if credit is available and women use the whole of it in investing within the business, their SMEs performance will improve. It is recommended that women owning SME’s should be encouraged to take the available credits which have competitive interest rates and deploy it in their business in order to enhance performance of their enterprises.