Entrepreneurial Motives and Challenges of SMEs Owners in Emerging Economies: Nigeria & South Africa

This paper is a comparative analysis of the peculiarities of entrepreneurial motives and challenges that exist in emerging economies. The paper also emphasizes the fact that knowing what entrepreneurs are up against would get them prepared and inexorably minimize the effects of the challenges. Research findings show that entrepreneurs set up business ventures basically for various reasons, and individuals become entrepreneurs primarily due to pull, than push factors. 1200 samples were purposively drawn from two African emerging economies. Pre-tested questionnaires were administered among entrepreneurs in the economic hub to both economies. The analysis was done using descriptive statistics and one-way analysis of variance. The research findings show that a greater proportion of the entrepreneurs in both economies were driven by passion and very few were poverty driven. The results also show that entrepreneurial challenges are typical of every emerging economy but vary in certain cases. Furthermore, the results show that there is a significant difference in the average income level and the number of years in business (F=7.60; p<0.05), whereas in South Africa, there is no significant difference in average income level and the number of years in business (F=1.41; p>0.05). The study concludes that the challenges such as epileptic power supply, lack of finance, and low patronage would continually hamper entrepreneurial activities and inexorably increase the failure rates of entrepreneurship in these economies if the challenges persist.