Financing Ceramic Artists and Fashion Designers in Small and Medium Scale Enterprises (SMEs) in Sekondi-Takoradi, Ghana (Published)
Small and Medium Scale Enterprises (SMEs) face numerous financial challenges in their contribution towards the socio-economic development in Ghana. As a result, most ceramic artists and fashion designers in SMEs often are confronted with global economic crisis and are unable to grow their businesses to become big firms. The general objective of the study was to investigate the funding challenges facing Ceramic Artists and Fashion designers who owned small and medium scale enterprises in Ghana as well as examined what could be done to help mitigate these challenges. The study adopted purposive sampling technique to select forty (40) respondents comprising twenty (20) ceramic artists and twenty (20) fashion designers who owned SMEs within Sekondi -Takoradi Metropolis. Questionnaires and interview schedules were developed and used to collect data from the sampled ceramic and fashion enterprises. Statistical techniques such as mean and percentages were used to analyze the data collected while descriptive analysis was used to generate graphs, charts and tables. It was established that some of the financial challenges facing ceramic artists and fashion designers in Sekondi-Takoradi metropolis included financial constraints such as raising capital in starting the business, lack of collateral, the fear of taking risk, high cost of lending, the demand for collateral by banks and micro finance as well as the delay in the processing of loans to access credit. The study concluded by recommending among others that, loan acquisition processes could be shorter and simple. Additionally, low interest and financial training could be given to the ceramic artists and fashion designers to aid them in keeping proper financial records so as to sustain their art businesses.
Keywords: Ceramic artists, Collateral, Micro-Finance, cost of lending, credit access, fashion designers, financial constraints
A Study on Participation in Self Help Group and Subsequent Social Capital Attainment (Published)
Researches shows that socio-economic status (SES) correlates with social capital, and groups with low SES, usually have less opportunity to advance their lives. Women’s empowerment and self-confidence are primarily determined by their resources and their ability to make social and economic decisions. Microfinance provided by self-help groups aims to empower women and create social capital. The study examines the change in socio economic status of the SHG members and its subsequent impact on the social capital by analyzing randomly collected responses of 392 SHG members from the state of Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh and Andhra Pradesh. SPSS is employed for statistical analysis. The Mann-Whitney U test, the Kruskal- Wallis H test, and the Jonckheeree Terpstra test have been applied judiciously to test hypotheses both before and after data where ever possible.
Keywords: Micro-Finance, Social Capital, Women Empowerment, self-help groups, socio-economic empowerment