Climate Change, SME Growth, and Resilience in Tanzania: Evidence from Dodoma Region

https://doi.org/10.51867/ajernet.7.1.82

Authors

  • Danford Ahadson Sanga Department of Accounting and Finance, The Local Government Training Institute, P. O. Box 1125 Dodoma, Tanzania

Keywords:

Adaptation, Climate Change, Entrepreneurial Ecosystems, Resilience, Tanzania

Abstract

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are increasingly experiencing the problem of climate change, particularly in the semi-arid regions of developing economies such as Tanzania where the activity plays a critical role in the areas of providing employment, generating income, and the overall economic growth of the local environment. In addition to the discussion of the effects of climate change to the development and resilience of the SMEs in the Dodoma Region, whether the adaptive strategies are mediating factor between climate change and the entrepreneurship development and whether the entrepreneurial ecosystem support is a mediating factor between climate change and SME growth are discussed in this paper. It has been carried out on 300 SMEs of manufacturing, service, and retail industries using questionnaire. Descriptive statistics analysis, reliability and correlation tests, the multiple regression, bootstrapping of the mediation and moderation test using SPSS and Smart PLS were used to analyze data. The findings suggest that climate change could cause a substantial decrease in the income of the SMEs, job, productivity, and disruption recovery capacity. The adaptive strategies like product diversification, realignments and networking of operations were also noted to partially counter these negative impacts. Moreover, additional mitigation of the adverse outcomes can be achieved by providing more effective support (in terms of access to finance, information, and institutional resources) of an entrepreneurial ecosystem. These findings highlight the necessity to establish regional business ecosystems, including SMEs within national systems of climate adaptation, and to increase the availability of climate-related finance (and technical support). Active adaptation measures are required on the part of SME practitioners as a form of enhancing resilience, livelihood protection, and growth amidst an environment that is increasingly becoming volatile.

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Published

2026-03-07

How to Cite

Sanga, D. A. (2026). Climate Change, SME Growth, and Resilience in Tanzania: Evidence from Dodoma Region. African Journal of Empirical Research, 7(1), 959–972. https://doi.org/10.51867/ajernet.7.1.82

Issue

Vol. 7 No. 1 (2026): Jan-Mar 2026

Section

Articles
Copyright & Licensing

Copyright (c) 2026 Danford Ahadson Sanga

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

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