Indian Journal of Science and Technology

Abstract

Aim/objectives: To examine the impact small and medium enterprises have on employment generation in Kaduna state, Nigeria and devise new ways in boosting employment generation by enterprises. Methods/Statistical analysis: Primary data is utilised with the help of a questionnaire; a survey is carried out from 5 selected SMEs having a sample size of 1,000 respondents with 200 respondents in each of the 5 selected SMEs. The variables in concerned were analysed using the Kaiser Varimax Rotation for factor analysis to show the correlation and level of significance exhibited. The SPSS software version 20 was used for this purpose. Findings: Findings in the study showed that there are disparities in the employment generation trends among the selected SMEs which are as a result of inequity in finance, policy discontinuity, insecurity, lack of awareness, ineffective market linkages, among others. The correlation matrix shows that the variables are seen to correlate at the minimum significance level thus proving our hypothesis of how significant the impact SMEs have on employment generation. Also the extraction values of all the variables are quite high indicating that they are good extraction values and as the acceptable cumulative % value is 60%, our eight variables used have been reduced to four factors which explain our total variance at a cumulative % of 69%; this clearly shown that 69% of the variance is explained by four (4) distinct factors. The result however showed that all the variables exhibit good relationship among each other which also implies that they have great impact on employment generation as their factor loading is very high. Novelty/Applications: Findings in the study will fill the gap in the literature of employment generation by small and medium enterprises and its outcome will pave way in facilitating new models in bolstering employment generation.

Keywords: Employment generation; Kaduna; Nigeria; small and medium enterprises