ISSN: 2222-6990
Open access
Technology and the widespread usage of the Internet has eased the efforts of society in terms of communication, running business activities online and keeping up with the current events worldwide. Everything is just a click away. In terms of entrepreneurship, technology is a crucial and indispensable tool to business owners and managers as it allows small businesses access to market, the global logistics chain, and garnering them new customers effectively while boosting the upgrade of their internal operations. The productivity and effectiveness of small and medium-sized enterprises in developing countries is also affected by the rate of diffusion of communication technology, which is considered an important driver for business expansion in rural environments. This also gives a boost to the B40 group of entrepreneurs from an economic and business continuity point of view. This paper aims to descriptively investigate and discuss the needs of digital inclusion (social networks, marketing, ICT training) among B40 entrepreneurs in Selangor as well as test the implications of digital inclusion on the empowerment of B40 entrepreneurs in Selangor. Quantitative methods were used in this study by distributing questionnaires face-to-face to a total of 618 B40 entrepreneurs with multi-level sampling. The data was analyzed descriptively to obtain an interpretation of the mean score and analyzed inferentially through regression tests to find out the contribution of the independent variable towards the dependent variable. The results of the study found that the level of frequency of social networking and marketing is moderately high, while ICT training is moderately low. The results of the multiple regression test (Stepwise) found that social networks and marketing contributes positively to the empowerment of B40 entrepreneurs. This finding explains that entrepreneurs who have an effective network of social media and marketing have a high level of empowerment.
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