Global Journal of Management and Business Research, C: Finance, Volume 22 Issue 4

comprehensive data is a major obstacle to the analysis of SMEs in the Zimbabwean context, a specific effort was devoted by the researcher to improve the literature review factual base by looking at a number of dimensions from existing knowledge and juxtaposed it to the Zimbabwean scenario on SME access to finance from the government aided financing institutions. The second part consists of drawing inspiration from studies done in other jurisdictions. This was key in drawing key comparative lessons. This inspiration of the experiences derived from African countries and beyond, provided the characteristics, diffusion and uptake by SMEs to understand the effectiveness and relationships of variables in supporting SMEs financing to innovative or potentially achieve highgrowth of the SMEs sector. Generally, this review methodology enables this paper to understand SMEs difficulties and in the end, the paper makes recommendations on how to overcome financing constraints, evaluate what contextual factors can improve or hamper SMEs’ access to financing and hence illustrate policy experiences and the changes required thereof to identified constraints. Thus, the review leveraged secondary sources, including policies and available literature on SMEs financing. III. SME s F unding – T axonomy of the D ependent and I ndependent V ariables SMEs funding is important to the success of any economy (Maziriri & Chivandi, 2020). However, the success of any SMEs business is dependent on many relationships that exist in the marketplace. It is imperative that these relationships, should be understood in their micro-and macro environment. They are the factors which have to be examined in their entirety within a particular setting and they vary from one economy to the other. The Zimbabwean socio-economic and political environment is arguably one of the most dynamic one with policies changing from time to time as the environment is characterised by Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity (Troise et al., 2022), SMEs enterprises need to strategize not only to remain competitive and profitable, but also be resilient to overcome potential predictable and unpredictable threats considering the difficult environment they find themselves. It is a reality that selling stocks during the Covid -19 pandemic, had its consequences on the overall performance of the SMEs, and it is one such unanticipated occurrence, which besides having serious implications for public health, also significantly impacted SMEs businesses in almost all sectors. With the pandemic continuing, although much less in terms of impact, SMEs enterprises have to have tools and methodologies to better respond to this situation – and one of them is on how the financing of their operations have to be done in a VUCA environment. As such, enabling effective policymaking, fiscical and strategy formulation within the SMEs sector to address emerging trends, disruptive global changes, and an uncertain future become key for SMEs sustainability without which, many of them face collapse. Using categorical variables analytic model (Westerlund, 2020), it has been identified in this paper that critical components conceptually articulating the relationship between the dependent and independent variables play a role in the context of SMEs financing. These variables cover six pillars summarized below: Independent, Dependent variable in SMEs financing Source: Adapted from Harvie et al (2013) with Researcher’s own additions and conceptualisation Taxonomy of Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) Constraints: An analytical Perspective of Zimbabwe Global Journal of Management and Business Research Volume XXII Issue IV Version I Year 2022 ( ) C © 2022 Global Journals 2