12- Negative perception
● Total number of respondents: 242
One of the challenges that African SMEs are confronted with is that their businesses are perceived to be unable to provide required quality products and services compared to larger organizations. We wanted to validate this challenge as being still one and how it manifests itself.
Table 2.22: Negative Perceptions
The frst two survey questions dis-validate this as being still a current challenge for African SMEs; When asked whether “My business is perceived to be unable to provide required quality products and services compared to large businesses” we fnd that 40,9% disagree and 19,4% strongly disagree with this frst statement (totaling 60,3%). Then when asked “We cannot obtain market share due to very hard competition with well-known names brands and reputation”, again a majority 51,3% (40,1% disagree and 11,2% strongly disagree with the statement). This does not exclude the fact that small businesses must stand up for ferce competition like demonstrated with the high agreement rate to the statement “My business must work very hard to excel in its services and product quality” (53,7% agree and 28,1% strongly agree). Similarly, this is reinforced with answers given to the statement “My business must have well elaborated strategies
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