The study sought to investigate a possible relationship between SMME owners’ financial literacy and business growth. Relationships between the SMME owners’ financial literacy and several aspects of possible business growth along the broad dimensions of financial, strategic and structural growth were also explored. To achieve this though, the study had to first establish whether SMME owners were financially literate or otherwise and whether their businesses showed some forms of growth. Primary data was collected in a cross-sectional manner, from a sample of small businesses drawn from a local chamber of commerce in the Gauteng Province of South Africa. The study empirically demonstrated that most small businesses showed signs of growth. The growth signs were however, predominantly along the financial and strategic growth dimensions rather than the structural dimension. Indeed, along the more tangible structural dimension, majority of SMMEs seemed to have stagnated. Curiously, the study was unable to demonstrate that a statistically significant relationship existed between owners’ financial literacy and the broad construct of business growth. Even when this broad construct was decomposed into different growth indicators drawn from the financial, strategic and structural growth dimensions, similar statistically insignificant relationships seemed to exist between the owner’s financial literacy and each of them, individually; the superficial interpretation of which could be that financial literacy of the SMME owner bears no relationship with the growth of the business; especially if finance experts can be retained as consultants or employees by the business.http://www.mcser.org/journal/index.php/mjssam201

The aim of this study was to find out whether youth entrepreneurs in a South African township consider entrepreneurship education and training as a useful vehicle for navigating the challenging waters of entrepreneurship. The method used to collect data was a self-administered questionnaire. Findings revealed that the participants thought of entrepreneurship education and training as a viable tool for entrepreneurship development. The study recommends further research on other townships with similar characteristics to enable a better understanding of the unique needs of the different townships. This is on the basis that should an intervention be proposed, each township should then have a much more customised training and development strategy.

Declining entrepreneurship as indicated by low total early-stage entrepreneurial activity (TEA) and high business failure is unacceptable in any economy. This predicament is indicative of South Africa’s business environment as well as the entrepreneurial disposition of firms operating within it. However, the factors precipitating entrepreneurial behaviour among small firms are yet to be fully comprehended and the environment as a motivation for entrepreneurship among these firms is yet to be examined thoroughly. Furthermore, research focus on the antecedents of entrepreneurial orientation (EO) is limited, even as EO has been considered as an aggregated construct repeatedly with inadequate attention directed at its independent constituents. In response to these concerns, this study investigates the relationships between environmental hostility (EH) and the individual components of EO among small businesses in South Africa. Using a quantitative methodological approach, the study conducts a survey, and analyses data obtained through random sampling. Through exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and partial least square structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM), it is discovered that only four components of EO are statistically recognisable, contrary to five as widely acknowledged in literature. Positive associations were also revealed between EH and each of these dimensions to varying degrees. These findings underline the necessity for entrepreneurial action along the lines of risk-taking, proactive-innovativeness, competitive aggressiveness and autonomy among small businesses in South Africa, given the hostile environment of her small business sector.

Small private colleges provide an important service to society while operating in a dynamic and competitive environment. The inability to operate in a manner that delivers desirable levels of satisfaction to students can prove fatal, more so given the relatively small size of their student populations. So, for these colleges, student retention is a critical condiment of business success and so the pursuit of service quality becomes amplified. In acknowledgement of the subjective nature of service quality that makes service quality studies very context specific, this empirical study takes a quantitative research approach to investigate the extent of association, if any, between service quality dimensions, student satisfaction and student retention in the specific context of small private colleges in South Africa. Study findings indicate the existence of statistically-significant positive (though moderate) associations between dimensions of service quality and student satisfaction as well as between student satisfaction and student retention. Though results ought not to be generalized, the study’s findings nonetheless, bode useful lessons for small private colleges, if the quest for improved business performance, based on student retention, is to be realized.

Big data (BD) adoption is still relatively slow despite the numerous business opportunities that it embodies. Within the context of financial institutions in South Africa, the specific drivers of big data adoption remain largely indeterminate. Consequently, this study explores the possible relationships between perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use and actual big data adoption, while being duly cognisant of the role that behavioural intention to adopt big data could play. The study employed a survey research approach and relied on data collected from a purposive sample of 195 management level employees of financial institutions. Regression analysis to test the hypothesised relationships in the study revealed that perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use were statistically significant predictors of big data adoption. Instructively, this relationship was subject to the extent of behavioural intention of respondents. For respondents with a low behavioural intention to adopt big data, perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use displayed a statistically insignificant relationship with big data adoption. Conversely, the regression model for the group of respondents with a high behavioural intention to adopt big data is statistically significant. These findings enrich literature related to big data from a developing country context while concurrently identifying veritable antecedents of big data adoption in financial institutions.