| dc.description.abstract | This study was undertaken on Empowering Women Participation in public procurement in ministry of health. A Case of women owned enterprises in Kampala. It was guided by the following objectives namely; to examine the benefits of women owned enterprises’ participation in public procurement, to assess the factors that hinder women owned enterprises in taking part in public procurement in ministry of health, ant to identify strategies that can scale up women involvement in public process in the ministry of health in Uganda. The study was guided by a cross sectional case study research design. The researcher used simple random sampling for CEOs/Employees of women owned enterprises and Procurement Officers from Ministry of Health and purposive sampling on KACITA Management Officials. The study selected 155 participants as the sample.The study found out that there is a positive statistical significant relationship between public procurement and Participation of women owned enterprises with correlation (r= 0.457** P< 0.01), and regression coefficients, F=18.793 (p<0.01) respectively. In relation to Benefits of women owned enterprises’ participation in public procurement, the study found out that the following are the benefits, it increases their competitiveness and enhance job creation, it increases their impact on families, communities which links directly to economic growth and development; improves their efficiency since they can expand their business, have revenue to purchase quality supplies and services, pay employees on time as well as deliver goods and services on time; better results for greater gender inclusion are easily achieved; and increasing their ability to offer good customer care and after sales service as well as more flexible and responsive approach to changing customer needs. The study also found out that the following factors hinder participation of women owned enterprises from taking part in public procurement; lack of information about tender opportunities, overly complex and burdensome tender procedures, unreasonable technical and financial qualification requirements, contracts are large sized for women entrepreneurs to handle, insufficient time to assemble tenders documents, lack of feedback from the procurement office at ministry of health, lack of access to financial capital, as women face more hurdles in accessing credit compared to men, since they often do not have the collateral necessary to access commercial loans, and low education levels of most female entrepreneurs reduce their participation levels in government procurement activities. The study also found out that the following strategies can scale up women participation in public procurement; revamping procurement policy to promote, setting a target level of procurement spending that should go to businesses owned by women, offering preferential treatment for companies that apply rigorous gender equality and diversity policies, developing a public database of women suppliers and open government contracts; reducing barriers to women’s participation in the economy, and expanding government’s role in encouraging private corporations to spend more of their procurement budgets with women’s businesses. From the findings, the following recommendation were made; (i) make reforms in the procurement policies in order to promote sustainable and inclusive procurement; (ii) setting target levels on public spending that should go to businesses owned by women; (iii) preferential treatment to women owned enterprises during the procurement process; (iv) reducing barriers to women’s participation in the economy; (v) extending financial assistance to women owned enterprises; and (vi) Lessening the over complex and burdensome tender procedures. | en_US |
