Small and Medium Scale Enterprises (SMEs) as Agent of National Development in Sierra Leone

This study, Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) as agent of national development was undertaken in Bo district. In all, 470 small and medium business enterprise owners were selected randomly and interviewed using questionnaires. Other methods of data collection were desk survey and observation, Data collected were analyzed using Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS 16 and 23) applied on the data. A number of results, indices, frequency distributions, chi-square correlation, contingency tables, p-values, tests statistics etc. , were generated with several interactions. The overall objective of this study is to identify the effect of SMEs as agents of national development and based on the findings make recommendations for the improvement of the performances of the business. The findings showed that most of the small and medium business owners were Sierra Leoneans (91.7 %) and the rest were Guineans (8.2 %) and Lebanese (8.2 %). The majority of the respondents were in their productive age. Most of them were not educated, those educated had primary and/or secondary education. The respondents were fairly spread across a wide range of sectors, less than three-fourths of the sectors. (71.1 %) in the economy, majority of them came from, Export 8 (2.0 %), services 187 (38.9 %), manufacturing 72 (15.3 %) and Trading 70 (14.9 %) and the others (28.4 %). Management represents the greater of the problem, ranked (1) and occupied 3 % of the sectors of the circle and 10.8 % and the circle. More than three fifths of the respondents (68.0 %) had formal education and the rest three-tenths of the respondents (32.0 %) did not receive formal education. (64.0 %) of business establishments from the study area are operating in retail trade. Less than three-fifth of the respondents 18 (3.8 %) out of 470 are public limited liability companies.242 people are employed in the study area and more of them are in Kakwa chiefdom (60.0 %). More than three-fifths of the small and medium enterprises specifically 315 (67.0 %) out of 470 are private limited liability companies while 18 are public limited companies. Most of the respondents were sole owners of the business. The relationship between formal education and entrepreneurial success is surprisingly weak. Although not statistically significant, educational coefficient is negative (-87.97), perhaps that formal education and educational performance may be inversely related. The representative traditional peel brick oven bakery firm from the findings has the highest labour-capital ratio (17.0) and also the highest value added ration (4.5). The findings also reveal that only three of the five types of representative firms are even technically efficient. The straight sewing plus expensive embroidery machine representative firm (type 4) as well as the machine renting firms (type 1) are technically inefficient, since they require both more capital and labour to produce a unit of output than does the firm type that engages in straight sewing (type 3). The Cobb Douglass production function provides a reasonably good fit to the underlying data relating to the individual small and medium industries in Bo district. The C. E. S. formulation, however, has provided some interesting insights into the nature of the production relationships. The results derived from the C. E. S. production function not only support those derived from the Cobb-Douglass, but also provide evidence of the appropriateness of the Cobb-Douglass function itself.