Abstract:
The study is about Equity bank and the promotion of SMEs in Rwanda. A case of selected SMEs in Muhima Nyarugenge district (2019-2022). Specifically this study identified services provided by Equity Bank Rwanda to SMEs in located in Muhima Sector and analyzed the contribution of Equity Bank Rwanda in promotion of SMEs.In virtue to the main purpose of this study, researcher designed an appropriate research methodology and used the interview, documentary and questionnaire techniques to collect and analyse relevant data which allowed the researcher to obtain the following findings:
Regarding to the services provided by Equity Bank Rwanda to SMEs in located in Muhima Sector results shows that Equity Bank Rwanda provide to SMEs in located in Muhima Sector various services where the majority of respondents with 56.6% strongly agreed that Equity Bank Rwanda provides to SMEs saving and withdraw services. It was also revealed that 52.8% agreed that Equity Bank deliver Loans services to SMEs. On the other side 69.8% strongly agreed that they received training on the business management. Also 86.8% strongly agreed that Equity bank provides advisory services to SMEs. On the issues of the contribution of Equity Bank Rwanda in promotion of SMEs results shows that almost all respondents with 86.8% strongly agreed that their saving in Equity bank facilitate expansion of their Business. On the other side with79.2% agreed that their savings enable me to keep enough liquidity to meet my business current liabilities and 20.8% strongly agreed with this statement. The correlations matrix also shows that there is a strong relationship between the variables studied where the significant level is 0.01, the results indicate that independent variable has positive high correlation to dependent variable equal to .883** and the p-value is .000 which is less than 0.01. When p-value is less than significant level, therefore researchers concludes that variables are correlated. Therefore, these allowed researchers to confirm the second hypothesis stipulating that “Services provided by Equity bank main branch to SMEs located in Muhima Sector contribute to their growth at high level”.
