Opportunities and financial challenges of women entrepreneurs in Andhra Pradesh

The present paper makes an attempt to study the opportunities and financial challenges of women entrepreneurs in Andhra Pradesh with an objective to ascertain the financial and marketing constraints faced by women in their enterprise. The Scope of study is restricted to few districts in Andhra Pradesh and small business units.

The study was carried on 100 women enterprises with the help of structured questionnaires and efforts were made to cover all districts of Andhra Pradesh, with respect to small scale units with the help of data available from ALEAP,(Association of lady entrepreneurs in Andhra Pradesh) and FAPCCI (Federation of Andhra Pradesh Chambers of Commerce and Industry)and at some places snow ball sampling was also adopted. Data was collected through structured questionnaires and they being tabulated taking educational qualification of the respondents, turnover of the enterprise, year of establishment, and age of the respondents as variables.

Support mechanism such as institutional credit need to be strengthened to keep entrepreneurs aware about loan schemes/credit facilities for further expansion. It is a fact that the Human Resource Development efforts of entrepreneurship promotion mainly remain confined to certain limited areas and that too done irrationally. There is lack of exposure to different avenues and this emphasizes the need of entrepreneurial counseling and promotion with well-planned market surveys. This requires much insight on the part of officials to assess the local resources and employment potential, identify areas and plan training strategies accordingly.

Women entrepreneurship is a recent phenomenon and hence development of women entrepreneurship is essential to provide economic opportunities to women. Entrepreneurship is a concept assumed to be sexneutral. Yet, in India, women entrepreneurship is still in its infancy.Therefore, the present paper makes an attempt to study the opportunities and financial challenges of women entrepreneurs in Andhra Pradesh with the following