DUSHANBE, December 18, 2009, Asia-Plus — The IFC report, Business Environment in Tajikistan as Seen by Small and Medium Enterprises 2009, notes that women run 36% of individual entrepreneurs and 16% of small and medium companies. Women are among the owners of just over half of these firms. Only 9% of dehkan farms are run by women, although half of dehkan farm employees are women.
Women play an important role in the individual entrepreneur segment of the SME sector. Survey results indicate that 42% of the people working as individual entrepreneurs are women. Of the average of two employees per individual entrepreneur, the top manager is a woman in more than 1 in 3 individual entrepreneurs.
Women are the top manager in 16% of small and medium companies, and 29% of a small and medium company’s employees are female.
Due to limited usage of tractors and other farm equipment, the agricultural sector remains labor intensive. Survey results indicate that the average dehkan farm employs 20 employees on a permanent basis, 50% of whom are women. The top manager is a woman at just 9% of dehkan farms
Women’s access to credit is not constrained by Tajik laws regulating land, property rights or credit, and indeed, survey data indicate that women generally use credit and obtain approval for credit applications more than men. However, female dehkan farmers report reduced access to banking services, relative to male dehkan farmers. Collateral may be a key problem for these women, since most certificates of ownership for property are in male names only. Also, dehkan farms whose top manager is a woman are more likely to be micro-size businesses (fewer than 5 employees) than are those managed by a man.
Survey data demonstrate that female individual entrepreneurs have better access to finance than their male counterparts do, by about 9 percentage points, perhaps due to efforts of microfinance organizations to locate and support female borrowers. One hundred percent of female individual entrepreneurs who applied for loans report their applications were approved, except for women in Sughd region, where the figure was 91%.
Despite their better access to loans, female individual entrepreneurs are more likely to identify access to finance as an obstacle for their business. 36% of individual entrepreneurs are women.
Enterprise Survey data indicate that Tajik companies run by women more actively seek credit than do those run by men. Sixty percent of companies whose top manager was a woman applied for a loan in 2007, compared to only 34% of male-run businesses. Women’s approval rate was lower than men’s by two percentage points.
According to the Association of Microfinance Organizations of Tajikistan, more than 62% of clients of microfinance organizations are women. Data from one of the largest microfinance organizations show that the majority of its active female clients are between 31 and 50 years old, with some education beyond the high school level.
World Bank research indicates that even in rural areas, most women take out loans for their trading business, rather than for agricultural production. Relative to men, they are more likely to borrow to support business activities and livestock holdings and less likely to borrow for consumption or investment purposes.
Analysis of survey results by gender reveals different patterns for individual entrepreneurs and small and medium companies. Female individual entrepreneurs receive more inspections than men do, although inspections of women are slightly shorter. For small and medium companies, those managed by men receive more inspections. Yet female-managed companies spent more total time dealing with inspections in 2007, because their average inspection was about 2.5 hours longer. The number of inspections per dehkan farm is the same whether a woman or man was top manager.
Small and medium companies managed by women spent less than half as much money on all inspections in 2007 as male-managed companies, even though their inspections were longer.
