Currently, there is no comprehensive data on the number of women in the MSME sector, the size of their enterprises, or their distribution by sector. Only proxies are available. In NISS (1991) women accounted for about 35 per cent of informal enterprises. By 1995, it was estimated that the proportion of women in the sector could have risen to 70 per cent of the informal sector labour force. In a 2000 Economic and Social Research Foundation (ESRF) study, 55 per cent of the enterprises in the sample were owned by women (as reported in Mlingi, 2000, p. 89). Swisscontact (2003)
estimated that women owned 43 per cent of MSEs.
An official in the MIT-SME Section made references to 1.7 million when discussing the number of SMEs in the country. If one uses the proxy of 43 per cent (Swisscontact, 2003) as the proportion owned by women, then there would be about 730,000 women entrepreneurs in Tanzania. If one uses the extrapolated figures from the Swisscontact (2003) estimates (see Section 4.3.2), then there could be as many as 1.154 million women entrepreneurs. However, if one includes all formal and informal enterprises as the base for calculations, and the 70 per cent estimate cited in Mlingi (2000), then the number of women entrepreneurs would be significantly higher. For the moment, it can be assumed that there are somewhere between 730,000 and 1.2 million women entrepreneurs in the country, but this needs verification.
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