ABSTRACT

Rural women in Awgu currently live below the poverty line of one dollar per day. Their skill levels need to improve to take advantage of a competitive market. Government development initiatives and some non-governmental organizations (NGOs) design capacity building programme to achieve this. The purpose of the study was to evaluate the relationship between the capacity building efforts of selected initiatives and the sustenance of rural women enterprises in Awgu L.G.A. using a sample of 260 women. The study adopted a descriptive research design of the survey type and two-tailed test to test formulated hypotheses. The following hypotheses were tested, there is significant relationship between skill development and women’s ability to sustain enterprises, teamwork significantly relates with women’s ability to sustain enterprises, entrepreneurial development significantly correlates with women’s ability to sustain enterprises, financial empowerment significantly relates with the ability of women to sustain enterprises, there is significant relationship between government policy and the ability of women to sustain enterprises. Table value is taken at 5% level of significance. For decision rule, the study accepts any questionnaire item if and only if X is greater than µ, hypothesis is rejected if otherwise and accepts Null (Ho) hypothesis only if table value(1.96) is greater than calculated value. From the result of the findings, skill development, team building and entrepreneurial development are both significant in sustenance of women owned enterprises in Awgu L.G.A. The result also revealed that skill development enhanced women’s ability to sustain enterprises. The networking skills development strategy was particularly important in helping the women in raising the start-up capital, increased women’s awareness and exposure to good role models in business circle. The study also established that capacity building promotes entrepreneurial culture which builds in the participants’ ability to initiatives business, confidence, positive attitude, pride in success, support and encouragement and courage to implement new ideas for enterprise sustenance. Also revealed are the Constraints that militate against rural women sustenance of enterprise to a great extent in Awgu like lack of capital due to failure to give beneficiaries financial empowerment worsen by government policy which do not succeed in addressing rural development. The study concluded that majority of the women entrepreneurs were empowered in managing their businesses through the various capacity building trainings that they attended. Based on the findings, the study recommends; that women entrepreneur should take part in regular training on skill development and entrepreneurship and women entrepreneur should incorporate marketing strategy to increase their sale volume.