Training Effect of Japanese Management on African SMEs: The Case Study on Japanese Kaizen Training in Tanzania

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Abstract: Empowering indigenous African enterprises to participate in international supply chain, management education and training is desperately needed in African continent. We implement a 3-week experimental training program in a furniture cluster of Arusha, Tanzania. The program embeds Japanese management technique, named Kaizen, with entrepreneurship enhancement and financial management. Six months after the training course, a total number of 268 cluster-based furniture enterprises including training participants and their non-participant counterparts are interviewed. The results show that despite being disinterested in Kaizen at first, treatment enterprises put it in their business practice. This is more evident in an on-site coached group who received one-on-one introduction. We conclude that the Japanese cultural-embedded management practice, Kaizen, is present in the study area via the individual coaching combined training program; however, the business performance measured by labor value-added not yet reflects the training impact. We raise potential reasons for the insignificant training impact, the discrepancy between real-time and post-training interviews in the paper.

WSEAS Transactions on Business and Economics, ISSN / E-ISSN: 1109-9526 / 2224-2899, Volume 15, 2018, Art. #34

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Yessica C. Y. Chung, "Training Effect of Japanese Management on African SMEs: The Case Study on Japanese Kaizen Training in Tanzania," WSEAS Transactions on Business and Economics, vol. 15, pp. 348-362, 2018, DOI:
Yessica C. Y. Chung. Training Effect of Japanese Management on African SMEs: The Case Study on Japanese Kaizen Training in Tanzania. WSEAS Transactions on Business and Economics. 2018;15:348-362.
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