Cottage industries

There is an impressive array of cottage industries in Ethiopia. These vary in size, purpose, formation and in their employment capacities. The beauty of these industries lies in their abilities to reduce the number of the jobless in the country. Of course, a clear figure in this direction will help the research field in making deeper analysis of things.
It is true that in places like Japan and Korea, it is the smaller family of businesses or micro-industries that do most of the sub-contracting jobs. For instance, parts of a certain product are made and finished according to specification by smaller manufacturers.
For a small sub-contracting business, to reach that stage requires passing through many quality assurance stages. Nonetheless, comparing small businesses and enterprises, in such highly industrialized countries with newcomers or new ones in the developing countries is almost impossible as they are quite advanced in their own right, and since the cottage industries in the less developed countries have to develop yet to formidable micro-industries.
To drive home the issue home, cottage industries are primarily important in their ability to create employment rather than anything else. This state of affairs is true and has contributed to the growth of employment in the less developed parts of Africa, Asia or Latin America.
While their absorbtion capacity of the unemployed could be appreciated as constructive, they are far behind some of the similar institutions as discussed above. The only snag is that, after these cottage industries are established in the less developed countries, no one seems to be interested in visiting them or following their progress, much less monitoring the outcome of their products. For this reason and others, small businesses and micro-industries lag behind those in the relatively developed or semi-developed economies.
The levels of their productive capacities and the qualities of their outputs often become matters of discussion. They think more in terms of mass production rather than quality production. Of course, there are obvious reasons for this as they are in the less developed countries and with small investments and unskilled or semi-skilled manpower deployment.
Since the effect of globalization is continuing process, the requirements of the world Trade Organization are rather stiff. In this respect, those developing countries should be more careful with micro-industries and other smaller cottage industries, because, export items could be extracted from them in the future if not at the present stage.
It is thus clear that from the point of view of their importance in their abilities to contribute to the growth of domestic products, there should be plans for fostering rapid capacity building programmes.
In other words, micro-businesses, including cottage industries, should be revisited and ways and means should be meaningfully devised for restructuring them again.
One should not separate, however, the philosophy of micro-businesses and micro-industries from that held for bigger businesses.
So, in the final analysis, since the outputs of cottage industries impact upon the greater part of a country's overall economy, some degree of training, supervision, and monitoring should be in place to raise the qualities and standards of their products, and encourage them to increase their accessibility to bank loans for faster development.