Albert Tchey Agbenyegah
Human capital represents one of the primary essentials to successful entrepreneurial activities. As such, there is the need to determine the relationships between specific and personal challenges and the existence of human capital towards rural entrepreneurial activities. This study seeks to empirically investigate the influence of specific and personal challenges on the existence of human capital of entrepreneurial activities. A quantitative approach was adopted aided by a 7 Likert-scale questionnaire to solicit primary data for theory testing in order to either accept or reject the formulated hypotheses. A total of 300 owner-managers were selected through the simple random sampling approach. The main reasons for using this approach are to avoid bias during the sample selection process and for more representation of research participants.
The author employed different analytical tools namely descriptive statistics, the exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and the Pearson’s Correlation Coefficient to test the relationship between specific (SCs) and personal challenges (PCs) on existence of human capital (EHC).
Empirically this study found that SCs in terms of marketing challenges experienced a weak negative correlation on EHC, in terms of environmental challenges SCs there is negligible positive correlation with EHC. Besides, the study found that SCs in terms of managerial challenges lack correlation with EHC. Also the study found that PCs regarding human resources challenges shows weak negative correlation with EHC. However, PCs in terms of record keeping shows negligible positive correlation with EHC. The study recommends that more training should be offer to owner-managers through the establishment of local entrepreneurial hubs. There is the need to provide tailored-made role models to help` rural owner-managers of small businesses.