Women Entrepreneurship in Post conflict Societies: Reference to Trincomalee District, Sri Lanka

Abstract

The main purpose of this research is to contribute knowledge about women entrepreneurs in war ridden areas with special focus on North-East province. This research intends to analyze women entrepreneurs‟ business orientation, types of entrepreneurial ventures created and their motivations for business ownership in a resource constrained post war environment. Resource constrained post war environment is defined as a resource scarcity environment that involve inadequacy/shortages of necessary skills, access to finance and physical infrastructure, poor knowledge on technology and inadequate government support base. Further, this research will provide supportive policies and programmes for the women entrepreneurs in North-East province, and will act as reference for government policy makers, who are responsible for post war socio-economic development. Both qualitative and quantitative methods are used to analyze data. Multiple regression analysis is used to determine the relationship among independent variables and dependent variable. The independent variables are entrepreneurial orientation (innovativeness, risk taking and proactiveness), types of entrepreneurial ventures created and motivation for business ownership. The dependent variable is the ability to overcome post war resource constrained environment. This study concentrated on the determination of the strength of relationship between the independent and the dependent variables. Studying the nature of entrepreneurial styles of conflict ridden areas, which portrays lesser-heard characteristics of being members of post war communities and the strategy used by these women entrepreneurs would be slightly different and may differ from the mainstream entrepreneurial communities in Sri Lanka