Is sales performance amongst Rwandan enterprises gender based? : A cross-sectional study based on the Enterprise Survey from 2019

Abstract: Over the past two decades Rwanda has done outstanding work that has promoted female empowerment. The development resulted in a majorit of women in parliament, ensuring girls' education and high female participation in the labor force. An inclusive private sector could further promote sustainable development and help meet the country's emerging goals. The field of literature on how enterprises within the private sector perfrom is borad. Several studies find that women are underperforming, and that accesing finance is a major challenge for female entrepreneurs in developing regions. This paper research if there is a gender gap in sales performance amongst Rwandan enterprises in 2019 and how bank funding affect firms' perfromance in term of annual sales. A cross-sectional study was conducted by utilizing the World Bank Enterprise Survey form 2019 constituting of 365 Rwandan firms. Ths tudy adopts OLS, quantile and interaction regression to examine the relationships between annual sales and gender of the entrepreneur. The results showed a rather large perfromance gap and that bank funding have a substational effect on a firm's perfromance. However, the study could not establish a significant interaction between bank funding and female led firms. In order to diminish the established gap, policies are needed to promote gender equality wihtin Rwandas's formal private sector.