Who conducts the surveys:

Various universities and colleges from Somaliland, Puntland and South Central were trained by ILO-appointed consultant on the questionnaire design and data collection/input/verification for the Small and Medium Enterprise Surveys (SME) in collaboration with the International Labour Organization. The data was then verified again by the consultant before the analysis and report writing

Permissions of the survey respondents and the sensitive information they provide is necessary to ensure the greatest degree of survey participation, integrity and confidence in the quality of the data. The surveys were done with the full cooperation of the government agencies but confidentiality is never compromised.

Who is surveyed:

The SME Survey is responded to business owners and managers. Sometimes the survey respondent calls the employees into the interview to answer some questions. Typically 150 interviews are conducted by a single university and/or college.

Agriculture, Construction-related, Retail & Trade, Services and Small manufacturing sectors are the primary business sectors of interest. Any SME in the above mentioned areas are targeted for interview out of which a total of 150 were sampled in a given location. Services firms for inclusion were construction, retail, wholesale, hotels, restaurants, transport, storage, communications and ICT.

Structure of the surveys:

To be more focused, the survey questionnaire is divided into the following sections:-

• Business profile
• Operating environment
• Institutional environment for business
• View on local economic development
• Financing
• Business development services

Questions asked are geared towards potential sectors for knowing factors like who runs the business, the performance of the selected areas, licensing, financial facilities available, infrastructure and services available from the authorities. This knowledge will be disseminated to stakeholders and is expected to stimulate the economic growth.

The standard SME Survey topics include firm characteristics, gender participation, access to finance, annual sales, costs of inputs/labor, workforce composition, licensing, infrastructure, trade, competition, capacity utilization, taxation, informality, business-government relations, innovation and technology, and performance measures.

The questions objectively ascertain characteristics of a country’s business environment. The remaining questions assess the survey respondents’ opinions on what are the obstacles to firm growth and performance. The mode of data collection is face-to-face interviews.

It is worth noting that this is the first survey conducted after the fall of the former regime and the civil strife that followed. Basically, the data so obtained is like baseline because whatever was there before the war are not available.