Evaluation of access to finance, market and viability of small and medium-sized enterprises in South Africa

  • Received December 20, 2020;
    Accepted February 18, 2021;
    Published March 15, 2021
  • Author(s)
  • DOI
    http://dx.doi.org/10.21511/ppm.19(1).2021.24
  • Article Info
    Volume 19 2021, Issue #1, pp. 281-289
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

Access to finance and market has been described as a predominant challenge confronting small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Hence, this paper seeks to evaluate access to finance, market access and viability of SMEs. A quantitative research method and a purposive sampling technique were used to select the participants for this study. Respondents from retail, manufacturing, construction and agricultural SMEs operating in Durban, KwaZulu-Natal, were selected to complete the structured questionnaires. 310 questionnaires were returned out of 321 distributed. The study revealed a significant effect of access to finance (absolute value 0.425) and access to market (absolute vale 0.373) on SMEs’ viability with a 5% level of significance. Thus, it was concluded that access to finance uniquely accounted for the larger proportion of the variance in the regression model. Thus, this study suggests that owners of SMEs should pay greater attention to access to finance in running their businesses, and the Government should aid SMEs to market their products and keep their businesses viable. Public loans or the government supported loans should be made available for SMEs with soften requirements in order to stimulate economic growth.

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    • Table 1. Availability of the following source of finance for SMEs
    • Table 2. Output of regression analysis on access to the market and access to finance as predictors of SMEs’ viability
    • Conceptualization
      Thabiso Msomi
    • Data curation
      Thabiso Msomi
    • Formal Analysis
      Thabiso Msomi, Odunayo Olarewaju
    • Investigation
      Thabiso Msomi
    • Resources
      Thabiso Msomi
    • Project administration
      Thabiso Msomi
    • Software
      Thabiso Msomi, Odunayo Olarewaju
    • Supervision
      Thabiso Msomi, Odunayo Olarewaju
    • Validation
      Thabiso Msomi
    • Writing – original draft
      Thabiso Msomi
    • Visualization
      Thabiso Msomi
    • Methodology
      Odunayo Olarewaju
    • Writing – review & editing
      Odunayo Olarewaju