Gender, Age and Ownership of Small-Scale Business in Calabar Municipality, Cross River State, Nigeria.

Micro, small and medium enterprises are critical to socioeconomic development, because of the enormous contributions that they make to job creation, income generation and society’s stability. Available evidence points to a shrinking small business sub – sector, and this portends worsening socioeconomic conditions for the populace. Although various factors may have accounted for the situation, the focus of this study was to ascertain the relationship between socio-demographic variables and ownership of small - scale business. The study concentrated on the interconnections between gender, age and business ownership. Survey – inferential research design was adopted using a sample of 386 persons. Two hypotheses were tested and the results indicated that there is no significant influence of gender on ownership of small - scale business, and a significant relationship between age and ownership of small - scale business was established. The implications of the research findings include the fact that, while not ignoring the need to continually position the teeming youth populations for higher productivity, slightly older age groups should also be considered as target during entrepreneurship promotion programmes, in order to leverage their seeming high propensity for new venture creation. Keywords: Small-scale business, entrepreneurship, age, gender, socio-demographic variables