Input is as Good as Output: Effect of Training Inputs on Competencies of Business Trainees in Marsabit County, Kenya

Abstract

Business training is a key intervention mechanism for building competencies of business trainees which have yielded satisfactory results around the world. Efforts to enhance business competencies of youths, women and self-help groups in Marsabit Central and Marsabit South Sub-Counties which employed Systematic Training Cycle (STC) approaches had mix results. In addition, the youth development index and gender equality index were below the national indices of 0.58 and 0.65 respectively. The study areas also have unemployment rate of 65% among the youths and women. Motivated by these scenarios, a study was designed to analyze effects of business management training input on the business competencies of the trainees in the study areas. The study showed that about 50% of all business trainers have not trained their trainees in basic business management areas while 35.5% of the business trainees did not receive any repeat training as attested by the t-test (t = 0.01, p-value = 0.992, α=0.05) and Pearson Product Moment correlation coefficient (ρ=0.897). It was further established that generally the training input did not have significant effect on the business competencies of the trainees (b0 = 0.141, α = 0.05). However, sourcing of funds (p = 0.041, α=0.05), business communication (p= 0.029, α=0.05) and product/service selling (p = 0.044, α=0.05) had some significant effects on the trainees. These results depict that training inputs have not significantly enhanced the business competencies of the trainees. This implies that there could be internal or external training programme factors that may have contributed to such low business competence transfer.